


In the Bright Moonlight

by thesubparpirate



Series: The Changeling Duology [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fae, Angst with a Happy Ending, Auror Harry Potter, Celtic Mythology & Folklore, Changeling Draco Malfoy, Changeling!Draco, Creature Fic, HP: EWE, M/M, Memory Loss, Powerful Draco, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-21
Updated: 2017-06-28
Packaged: 2018-11-03 09:35:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 19
Words: 43,019
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10964538
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thesubparpirate/pseuds/thesubparpirate
Summary: It's seven years after the war and Harry Potter is perfectly fine, thanks. Until he starts having these bizarre dreams with an enigmatic man he feels like he should know, asking for a favor that sends him on a path he never otherwise would have followed.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hey folks!
> 
> This is the second in a two-part series, the first being "In the Deep, Dark Woods". The first one is set in Hogwarts and during the war, whereas this one is seven years later, when Harry and Draco are about 24 or so. I have most of the rest of the plot sketched out, and the way the story is it is possible not to read the first part (though I do recommend you read the first one). I actually wanted the story to start out in this time period when I began writing, but realized with everything that goes on in the plot, a lot more situating would need to take place than I thought - so, voila! 
> 
> Thanks for reading, and all the wonderful reviews! I get excited every time I read each one, and I don't have anyone beta-ing this work, so if you find any mistakes or plot holes please let me know :)

Harry Potter thought he was doing pretty well, thank you very much.

He had a steady job with his best friend, a nice little cottage outside of London right on the outskirts of the park he ran in every morning, and even a pet snake named Ziti.

So what if he felt sort of lost every now and again? His life had direction. And for the first time he’d chosen it, even if it felt like sometimes he hadn’t. And so what if he was lonely? That was only to be expected, after all. He was the darling of the wizarding world, he couldn’t rightly expect someone to forget about that over dinner. And hookups were absolutely out of the question—Harry had tried, and each one had failed spectacularly, leaving him even lonelier than before.

He had tried going out with Ginny, like everyone expected him to. And for a while they were happy. She was beautiful and strong, made of fire and bursting with energy, and Harry had loved her. He’d loved her with almost everything. If there was a little niggling worry in the back of his mind that something was off, he paid it no mind. This was how things were supposed to be. Until Ginny decided that they needed more than everyone’s expectations.

It had been hard for him, at first. But he had respected her decision—he loved her, after all. He wanted what was best for her. And if what was best for her hurt him, he could deal with that. If he became a little withdrawn and spent too much time with Ziti, well, at least the snake could talk. He was quite good company actually, with so much pomp and snark, arrogance spiced with more than a dash of narcissism—he vaguely remanded Harry of someone. That had to be better than just moping alone in his house all the time.

Today, though, Ziti was in a frightening state when Harry came back.

“Outssside,” the snake hissed accusingly when Harry opened the front door, gesturing with his tail to the windows which overlooked the woodsy park. “You keep sssaying you’ll make a snake door.”

“I said that one time before I remembered most of my neighbors are afraid of snakes,” Harry reminded him, but opened the back door nonetheless. “Please don’t eat the Winstons’ cat.”

“She’s _evil_ ,” Ziti protested. “She called my sssscales _ugly_.” Ziti had been smuggled into Knockturn to be made into a pair of shoes, and Harry had found him caged with about six other snakes when they took down the animal traders. Ziti had seemed to like Harry the best, and had insisted upon being taken to a proper home, so after some questions about venom (he had none) and eating habits, here he came to be.

“Obviously, then, she must be evil.” Ziti made an affirmative noise and Harry rolled his eyes, turning to rummage through the fridge. He didn’t understand how some wizards didn’t live with modified Muggle objects—even if the fridge ran off magic. And his microwave. He ate more dinners out of that than he cared to admit.

Harry idly glanced out the window, biting into an apple. It was a warm, sunny day—he figured Ziti would just go sun himself on a rock for a while. But then a little flash of white and orange caught his attention.

Ziti was cautiously hovering over the still body of a small fox, his tongue tasting the air in front of him. “Ah, no,” Harry protested around a mouthful of fruit, and walked out to meet him. “Don’t eat that, it may have some sort of disease—”

“Itsss alive,” Ziti said in alarm, his yellow eyes wide. “Fix it.”

 “Foxes eat snakes, you know,” Harry said, bending down to peer at the small animal.

“I am much bigger than him,” Ziti asserted proudly. “I could eat him.”

“Yes, well,” Harry muttered, and did a scanning spell to find that yes, the little creature did have a heartbeat. He seemed to be in shock—quite a bit of his rear left flank was bloody. Perhaps he had gotten into a fight with a larger animal and stumbled away to Harry’s house.

“Fixssss it,” Ziti pressed him.

“So you can eat him?” Harry asked distractedly, worrying over the little thing. The cut didn’t look too big, but he couldn’t quite get the clearest view from all of his fur.

“No, because he asked me to get you,” Ziti replied. “I thought you sssssaved lives.”

“I do,” Harry grumbled. “Human ones.” But, nonetheless, he hovered him through the air and brought him gently to the bathroom, setting him down on a spread towel so Harry could figure out what spells would help him.

Auror training only really gave him remedial healing spells, but the wound looked fairly shallow, so he figured the healing couldn’t be too different. Harry first put a spell on him to keep him in the state of unconsciousness, so that he wouldn’t freak out under Harry’s ministrations. Then he went to work.

After about fifteen minutes and considerable magic, the fox was stitched up and cleaned off, though he was still unconscious and breathing fast. Harry scanned him, as well, for any bugs or vermin, just in case he woke up and ran around the house before Harry could catch him—but the small creature was surprisingly clean. His fur didn’t even seem to have dirt in it, stark white on his belly and tail contrasting with the light orange of his back and haunches. His small black paws were delicate, but his claws could probably do considerable damage if he was compelled to use them.

His fur looked soft, but Harry was reluctant to touch him. He was a wild animal, after all, and so Harry levitated him once more and set him outside in the shade, close to the house. He debated leaving out some food and water, but decided that having a fox stick around a snake’s house was probably not the best of ideas.

After that, Harry scourgified the towels and threw his Auror robes in the laundry, telling himself for the millionth time that he would do the wash in a few hours. He microwaved some food, switched on the telly, and promptly forgot about everything else as he immersed himself in his shows.

Until Ziti slithered up into his lap. “He woke up.”

“Has he left?”

“No,” Ziti said. “I like him.”

“You had a conversation with him?”

“He was sitting by the windows when he woke up.”

“Ah.” Harry stroked Ziti’s head and flipped the channels on the remote, glad the little fox was alright.

 

_*_

 

That night, Harry had the best dream he’d had in _ages_.

After the war, he’d taken Dreamless Sleep until he’d been banned from it for the next ten years. His nightmares had been terrible, involving that flashing green light and those maniacal red eyes. Over the years, though, time created distance, and distance softened the harsh realities echoed in his nightmares.

He still had them, but less often, now. Maybe three times a week or so, instead of every single night. The only problem was, he never knew what kind of night it would be.

Tonight he stepped cautiously into his dreams, apprehension gnawing at him in a way his dream self didn’t understand, but his waking self knew was from waiting for someone to jump out, for a dementor to reach for him, for a loved one to die again.

Instead he found himself in the forest. Not on his way to death—his path was meandering and unfocused. He was here for no other reason than to be, and that alone befuddled him. He didn’t usually have aimless dreams. They, like his waking life, were often filled with purpose, as he needed them to be. Left adrift he just didn’t know how to function. So Harry figured that if he kept wandering along, he would eventually discover some sort of purpose for this.

And then he saw him.

A handsome man, hair catching the light that dappled the trees, stood a ways away. He stared into the dense foliage as though he did not notice the only other human being in the forest. Harry couldn’t help but be drawn to him, and as he walked, the other man turned slowly to meet his eyes. The closer Harry got, the more indecipherable intensity flashed in the other man’s gaze, silver as mercury and just as temperamental. Harry could feel the tension crackle in the air—it seemed as though the forest was responding to their movements. The other man’s expression flickered, and Harry couldn’t quite pinpoint what he found there before a cool façade overtook it—it was too dense, too muddled to just pick out one.

In dreams Harry rarely talked. In dreams, his default state always came out, and Harry always relied on actions more than words. He knew nothing other than what he wanted to do, and so he did.

Harry walked up to this other man, took his face in his hands, leaned down, and kissed him.

Harry tasted pine and autumn and the crisp fall air on his lips, sweet as wine. He sifted his fingers through that soft, fine hair, pulling them closer, deepening the kiss. The other man responded eagerly, one hand fisting the front of Harry’s shirt, the other clutching the back of his neck. Pressed together, Harry felt like his skin was on fire. He didn’t know who this was, but he _wanted_ him. He could feel a breeze rush across them, the wind blowing through the trees and making the leaves rattle—even the sun felt warmer on his skin. But nothing mattered except the two of them.

He’d heard once that one only dreamt of faces they’d seen before. And though Harry couldn’t remember seeing anyone who looked like this man, he must’ve. Maybe in the dark half-shadow of a club, maybe in line at the store, or passing on the metro. Maybe somewhere else, even more distant.

Eventually they pulled away. The other man licked his lips and reached up to brush Harry’s fringe from his face, fingertips whispering across the lightning scar on his forehead. As he looked up at him a line formed between his fine eyebrows, only a shade or two darker than his hair.

“You grew,” he said as though deeply offended, his lips twisting into a small frown. His voice was startlingly familiar, not quite as deep Harry’s own, and lilting with an infuriatingly posh accent that made Harry both want to keep him talking and shut him up with another kiss. 

Harry cocked his head. “Since when?” He figured he’d had his last growth spurt at about nineteen, and anyway he didn’t care about his height—he wanted to keep kissing. But the upset look on the other man’s face twisted is stomach, for reasons he couldn’t place.

“Since before,” he replied, his hand moving to stroke down Harry’s cheek, fingertips dragging across the rough stubble there. The line was still there between his eyebrows, but fading. His eyes met Harry’s. “I think I like this look better,” he said, his mouth quirking into a smirk. “And your voice changed a bit, too.” He cupped Harry’s face in his hands, thumbs skimming his cheekbones, and drew him in for another kiss. As they parted, he drew Harry’s lower lip lightly between his teeth, looking at him with mischief sparking in his light grey eyes.

“It’s very sexy,” he rasped in Harry’s ear, pressing up against him to suck on the delicate spot just under his jaw. Harry pulled him closer, feeling his chest rise and fall close to him, his hands running down his sides, running under his shirt, hooking on the beltloops of his jeans. He nearly laughed when he remembered how afraid he'd been, entering the forest. This was the absolute best dream he could imagine. 

“Who…” Harry wondered, his brain addled too much to form full sentences from the intoxicating taste and touch of this peculiar person. Harry stroked the length of his spine and he gasped, his eyelids fluttering, and pressed himself closer to Harry, undulating with their legs intertwined.

“Git,” the blonde man said rather too breathlessly to sound annoyed, fisting his hand in Harry’s wild hair and tugging just lightly enough to make him wince. “You know that spot’s much too sensitive.” But, if the way he kissed Harry’s throat was anything to go by, he didn’t seem too perturbed.

Harry had all sorts of questions bubbling up in his mind. However, they were lost the moment he got another obliterating kiss, and realized that, for now, he didn’t care about any of them.

 

_*_

 

The next morning when Harry woke up, all he really wanted to do was have some quality time with his left hand and the contents of his dream. However, he had an unfortunately limited time between when he woke up and when he went to work, and he had to choose between a long wank or a short run. Considering he and Ron had gotten relegated to desk duty after a case quite literally blew up in their faces last month, he had to do something to keep himself in shape in the interim.

When he reluctantly left on his run a few minutes later, Harry found he had a partner. About five meters behind him, the fox from the night before ran after him clumsily, lilting to the right so not to put weight on his bad leg. He stopped whenever Harry stopped, fleeing into the underbrush around the trails whenever Harry made eye contact with him, his bushy tail streaming behind him. Harry smiled and continued on, making a note to himself to leave out a scrap or two of meat a good length away from his house before he left for the Ministry. He seemed much smarter than an average fox—perhaps he’d lived near magic spaces before. That tended to affect animals in strange ways.

Either way, he certainly couldn’t keep a fox as a pet, especially not with Ziti. No matter how smart or how friendly the two were now, Harry was certain if there was ever a fight between them Ziti would quite obviously be the winner, even if he did come out of it worse for wear—and Harry didn’t want to deal with his indigestion the next day.

Harry showered, made himself a hasty breakfast of a piece of burnt toast and an apple, patted Ziti on the head as he blearily slithered from the warm space on the bed Harry had left to the sunny spot in front of the window, and hurried to the floo.

In between the green flames, he thought he saw another flash of orange by the window before he spun away.

 


	2. Chapter 2

“Ron, do you remember meeting any blokes with white-blonde hair at school?” Harry asked in the middle of the day, too bored with his tedious paperwork and too distracted by his dream to continue.

Ron seemed to think about it for a moment. “I dunno about white-blonde,” he said doubtfully. “Ernie is blonde, and so is that prick Zacharias Smith.”

“Yeah, but none of them have that color, really,” Harry sighed. “You know, the kind of blonde that looks sort of silvery.”

Ron shrugged. “Ask Fleur,” he said helpfully. “I’m sure she has loads of people in her family with hair like that. Why?”

“I dunno,” Harry mused, spinning in his chair, twiddling with his pen. They really were so much more effective than quills, it was a wonder that the Ministry hadn’t shifted over yet—though of course, that was one of the plethora of things Hermione was trying to implement. “I just had a weird dream, is all.”

           

_*_

 

That night as Harry slept, he found himself again in the clearing and again with company leaning against a tree trunk.

“You’re not wearing jeans today,” Harry remarked. The blonde man looked down at himself in apparent surprise, dressed in a white button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows and black slacks which accentuated the length of his legs.

“No, I’m not,” he agreed.

“Do you have many fancy meetings in the dream forest?”

He snorted indelicately. “This is hardly fancy attire,” he scoffed. “And besides, it doesn’t matter what _I_ do. This is for you.”

“What do you mean?”

He received a long-suffering sigh in response. “Whenever people come here,” he started, “and I show up, I dress in whatever makes them most comfortable or most willing to trust me or, well...whatever they like, really.”

“What do you mean, whatever they like?”

“I mean exactly what I said.”

Harry thought for a moment. “Do you get many other people here than me?” Surely a figment of his imagination didn’t have a better social life than himself.

The blonde raised his eyebrows. “Yes, all the time,” he said, more subdued than before. He sucked on his teeth and didn’t seem to want to talk about it anymore, staring at the grass by Harry’s feet morosely.

Harry opened his mouth to ask something, but he thought about it a second time and realized there were better questions to ask. 

“Am I really in a forest?”

“Yes,” the blonde said, lifting a shoulder lazily. “And no. You’re also in your bed.”

“I can’t be in two places at once.”

The other man scowled. “Don’t be silly. Of course you can.”

 _Well, that’s helpful._ Harry decided to change tactics.

“What’s your name?”

A flash of grey eyes, a tired, resigned smile. “You don’t remember much, do you?”

Harry was getting more befuddled by the minute. “Er…”

The other man laughed, and though it could have been at Harry, he didn’t think it was. He stretched languidly, cracking his swanlike neck with a sound that made Harry wince and reaching his long arms high over his head. “I’m not here to talk about names.”

“What are you here for?”

“For you.” He walked over and tapped Harry’s glasses farther up on his nose. Harry was about to remark on his limp, shying away from putting weight on his left leg, but he was stopped when the man said, “I need you to do something for me.”

“What would that be?” What could a person like this possibly need?

He pursed his thin lips and a slight breeze pulled at Harry’s hair. It carried a scent like electricity, of magic. “Let me tell you a story.”

Harry blinked. “Alright.”

The man pushed off from his tree trunk, walking over to sit cross-legged in the middle of the clearing. Harry couldn't help but notice again that he lilted to one side.

“What happened there?” Harry asked, motioning as he sat down next to him.

The blonde made a face. “I made someone angry,” he said, waving his hand. “Doesn’t matter. Do you want to hear the story or not?”

Harry kind of wanted to continue talking about his injury—he felt it was important, that it rang something in his mind that he was in too much of a dreamlike state to recognize. But he knew the other man didn’t, and so he nodded.

The other man scrutinized him for a few beats before taking one of Harry’s hands in both of his, lacing their fingers together. He stared at the grass in front of him, unable to meet Harry’s eyes. “You don’t remember,” he said, stroking Harry’s knuckles, more to sooth himself than anyone else, “but this story has to do with what I need you to do for me.”

Harry nodded again, unwilling to break the near total silence the forest had fallen into.

“There was a woman, once,” he began. “She was brave and headstrong, and full of life. She had a younger sister, smaller and frailer, who was dying much too soon. She was only a little thing, and the fever that winter hit her hard. The townsfolk talked about her family in hushed whispers, sending her pitying glances whenever this woman walked past.

“She cared about her sister greatly. Their mother had been taken in childbirth, and though their father loved both of them, the elder was too vibrant, too confusing for him to understand, the simple man he was. Her sister was sweet as sugar and happy as could be. She had no fire or rebellion in her—that was all her older sister. Everyone who met her loved her.

“So the elder daughter made a decision. A choice she only talked about to one person, her lover. He begged her to stay, told her that what she was doing was unnatural and she’d surely pay for it, but she had to do it. She had to try.

“So, she entered the forest, and spoke to the Queen.”

Harry winced at how hard his hand was being squeezed, enough that he thought he could actually feel the bones shifting.

The blonde took many deep breaths after this, took such a long pause Harry wasn’t sure he would continue. “Sorry,” he said softly. “I try to tell this to do her justice, but I’m not sure I can.”

“You know her?” Harry asked.

“I might,” he responded. “The only way I can tell this story is if it is but a myth.”

The leaves rustled in the trees, the breeze colder now than it had been. 

 Finally, he continued. “The courts struck a deal with her,” he said. “The health of her sister for a lifetime of servitude. She agreed, because she thought she knew a loophole.”

He took many more deep breaths, bringing Harry’s hand close to his face and pressing a kiss to the back of it.

“Are you alright?” Harry asked.

“It’s just…difficult to talk about,” he said. “But I can continue. Seven years after her agreement serving the fae, their magic renewed itself. Every seven years they re-grew their magic in the raised courts, drunk off their festivities, secluded to their raucous rebirth. Though it is a time of great power, it is also a time of great vulnerability—their magic is at its weakest point, and things slip through the cracks.

“In preparation for this night, the woman came to her lover in his dreams, instructing him to wait at the outskirts of the forest in the dead of night as the moon was high. She would come to him riding on a white stallion, one she had stolen from the Queen, and he would have to pull her off and into his arms. She could not jump from the horse herself—the contract she made with the Queen meant she could not willingly tear herself away, that without someone to do this with her, she would always be called back into the forest. And it could not be her sister, for she was too close—she was the one for whom she had bargained her life away. She needed someone on the outside to tear her away. And so she set everything up for this man she loved, and all he had to do was be there and take her into his arms, and they would be free.

“But she had made a mistake in this man she so trusted. After she left, he had fallen into a deep depression. He dreamt of her often and did not believe in the dreams, which were very real indeed. The townsfolk couldn’t remember her ever having lived there, and so when he spoke of her to his fellows, they thought he was mad. He took to drinking to erase the visions, the madness, and the isolation.”

Keeping Harry’s fingers clasped tightly in one hand, he sighed, his other running through his fine blonde hair and making it stick up at odd angles. “He did show up that night, by the edge of the forest. He wanted to prove to himself that the dreams were just nothing, so he was piss-drunk and unprepared. When she burst from the forest, her eyes wild from the escape, hair gleaming in the moonlight, horse frothing at the bit, he stumbled and fell into the dirt. He was not there to hold her, but they watched each other as they passed, her eyes meeting his in terror and horror and fury. And so the horse circled back to its master, and she howled and cursed his name to the moon and the stars and the night sky.

“Faes like sevens, Harry. Seven is a strong number, a powerful one. It’s the only one ever of any actual use.” Troubled grey eyes peered searchingly into Harry’s own, and the thin, elegant fingers around his own tightened. “Do you understand what I’m asking?”

Harry swallowed heavily, scrutinizing the other man’s face. “I think so.”

The blonde bit his lip and dropped Harry’s hand, instead crawling into his lap and wrapping his arms around Harry’s neck. Harry let him, feeling his breathing tickle the side of his head, and wrapped his arms around his back.

“I know it’s a lot of pressure,” he said quietly into Harry’s ear. “But I figured, if I needed to be saved, who better to ask than the Savior himself?” His chuckle was a little watery from anxiety, his breathing more rapid than normal, but the fingers stroking through Harry’s thick hair tried to distract him from it.

The drizzle and mist had picked up throughout the story, making everything cold and damp. The branches of the trees rattled like skeleton bones. Harry wasn’t sure how he knew, but he knew that his peculiar companion was the one doing this—that he was so distraught, he was affecting the environment around them in drastic ways.

Though Harry himself was extremely worried about what the story meant for him, he also didn’t like the thought of getting caught in a clearing in the middle of a thunderstorm.

He made comforting noises, bringing one hand to cradle his head, his fingers carding through the soft blonde hair, and the other arm tightening around his back. He felt the man in his lap take a deep, shuddering breath, his whole body shivering.

“Sorry,” he apologized, swallowing thickly and drawing back slightly, pressing the heels of his hands to his eyes. His face was flaming red. “Sorry, this is…this isn’t the way to do this, draping myself over you and…it’s just, I’ll, um—” He moved to clamber out of Harry’s lap, but Harry kept his arms around him.

“You’re upset,” Harry said gently. “It’s alright to be upset in front of me.” Harry didn't know much and he didn't know how, but he knew that, at least. 

But the other man shook his head stubbornly. “It’s not—” Harry cut him off by pressing a swift kiss to his lips, and he started in surprise.

“It’s alright,” he stressed again, brushing the blonde fringe out of his eyes with one hand and cupping his cheek with the other.

He scoffed and turned out of Harry’s reach, running his hands through his hair and covering his face in shame, but Harry could see a small, self-deprecating smile twist his lips. “Always the bloody Savior,” he muttered, but hugged him again nonetheless. “Fucking ridiculous.”

After a while, the rain stopped, the breeze quelled, and the sun began to shine weakly through the leaves.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a little side note - the story that Draco tells Harry is a real myth about the fae! I tweaked some parts to fit my story (like the fact that in the myth, she's at the end of a whole group of fae who go out hunting in the full moon instead of by herself - for what isn't specified - or that in the myth they meet in the middle of the village square instead of by the forest) but I've tried to keep the integrity of the myth intact regardless! Also in the myth her husband had three chances, but I kind of wanted to up the stakes here.  
> Happy reading! :)


	3. Chapter 3

 

As Harry walked through the forest in his next dream, he announced, “I knew you.”

Immediately upon waking that morning, he’d launched himself out of bed and scribbled a hasty letter to the one person he knew who was weird enough to actually help him on this bizarre quest. Unfortunately, she was in Argentina, and he wasn’t sure quite how long it would take the heavyset post office owl he'd rented to get from one end of the world to the other.

He had spent the rest of the day in a haze, trying to remember anything he could about his companion that he hadn’t already gleaned from dreams. He figured that any memories he had would probably hit him right when he was least expecting them, which helped him not at all as he continued fruitlessly and aggressively try to remember. But he _knew_ he knew him. He just needed to figure out how.

Today was a particularly overcast day in the forest, with heavy clouds and a small pattering of sickly drizzle every few minutes. The mist clung to the vegetation and made everything damp giving it an even more dreamlike quality than his others.

Harry wondered as he looked around if his companion was upset again, thinking of last time, and if so, what had put him in a mood.

“Yes, darling Scarhead,” a sarcastic voice came from between the trees next to him. Seemingly out of nowhere, the other man appeared, his lips twisted in a well-meaning smirk. But as he looked into Harry’s face a flash of doubt seemed to cross his expression, for a just a flicker.  “I don’t know how many times here it’s taken me to convince you.”

Harry didn’t know if he’d imagined the flicker or not. “Are you alright?”

“Perfectly,” he replied, beaming widely in a way that didn’t reach his eyes. “I’m just peachy.”

Harry pursed his lips and raised his eyebrows, glancing around at their dreary environment. “Are you sure?”

“I know what I feel,” he snapped. He shifted his shoulders and crossed his arms. “I’m fine.”

Harry bit his lip, wondering how much he should prod the beast. _Well, what the hell._ “You don’t seem fine.”

His companion's nostrils flared and he rolled his eyes. “Potter,” he spat under his breath, shaking his head. “Even if I wanted to talk about it, I can’t.”

“Why?”

It was that question that didn’t just crack the strange man's composure, but shatter it altogether.

“What’s done in the forest becomes part of it!” he shouted, holding his arms to his chest even tighter.  “The magic makes it so! The fae—they—I—there wasn’t time!” he released in a breath. “I couldn’t stop it, she wasn’t in time!”

“In time for what?” Harry puzzled, hesitantly reaching out a hand, knowing it would probably be bitten off in light of this alarmingly rapid emotional escalation.

“Nothing!” he roared, shouldering away from him and stumbling backwards. “There wasn’t _any_ time! Anywhere! And I couldn’t get her back to it! And so she got lost! And I couldn’t—I couldn’t—she was only little, and they—and the Queen—she—I—!” he hung his head and turned even more fully away from Harry, shuddering.

Harry stood helplessly behind him, ham-fisted and awkward, not knowing what gentle things to say in response to the muddled, distressed hodgepodge of words plucked from the sentences they weren't allowed to form.

“It’s okay—”

“It’s _not_ okay!” he yelled thickly, hunching over with the force of it. “There has never been anything less okay, _Potter_ , so kindly just _shut up_!”

So Harry did. He shut up. And then he did the only thing he could think of, and carefully wrapped him in his arms. Harry was just tall enough that the other man’s head fit in the junction between his neck and shoulder.

“Can’t believe you got taller than me,” he huffed angrily into the cloth of Harry's shirt, still glowering, finding any excuse to distract attention away from the issue at hand.

Harry hummed, undeterred, and held them there for a while, hoping it would be enough.

Eventually, Harry felt his hands on his chest, pushing him away. “Enough,” he said, shaking his head with his eyes fixed firmly on his own knuckles, pieces of hair sticking up in disarray from spending time with his face in Harry’s t-shirt.  Harry noted that the whites of his eyes were pinkish, and his face was shadowed with strain. “I—apologize that I shouted. That’s enough.”

Harry tilted his face up and kissed him, tasting his tongue and the sweetness of his lips, chapped as they were. His hands bunched in Harry's shirt before moving up to his neck, and he deepened the kiss. For many moments, they lost themselves in each other. 

When they parted, Harry asked, “Better?”

His companion sighed. “What happened to the child who wasn’t me happened again to someone else,” he riddled, taking deep breaths. “Last time, in time, I was there and couldn't do anything, but this time—I was there and out of time—I had to, she made me—I didn’t—didn’t want to—”

Harry shushed him as he heard his voice pitch higher and higher as he attempted to explain. “You don’t have to tell me,” he reassured him concernedly. "I know it's hard." His companion nodded and threaded their fingers together, pressing them to his chest while his free hand stroked Harry's wrist, a nervous habit that Harry was beginning to recognize.

“Can I ask you a question?” Harry asked, feeling the light breeze pull through the leaves, less gloomy than before though the air still held the same sort of stormy tension that let Harry know that his companion’s worries were still very present.

“Yes.”

Harry knew that this was not the best time to ask, but he had to know.  “When did the seven years begin for you? From the story?”

The odd man with a quicksilver gaze chewed his lip, his eyes darting between the trees worriedly as though searching for something. “If you’re having these dreams,” he said cautiously, “Wouldn’t you think the end has begun?”

Harry furrowed his brow and frowned. “Can be a little clearer?”

“No more than I already have,” he said.

“Why not?”

“Because of the forest, and once you find out, I can’t be here anymore.” He fidgeted with his free hand, plucking at the buttons on his sleeve and on his collar. “Then it will be your turn to find me.”

Harry observed him for a beat, that exhausted, defeated air about him he had. “I am going to find you,” he said with conviction.

His companion smiled softly, sadness on his face. “I’m sure you think so,” he said. “Rouquine worries.”

“Who?”

“A friend,” he sighed, running his fingers over Harry’s knuckles. Before his eyes, Harry saw a flash of red hair, a gleaming white horse, and wide, horrified hazel eyes. “Things didn’t turn out for her the way she planned. She only means to prepare me in case, but I…tend to harp on the worst possible outcome.”

“I’m coming to get you,” Harry promised. “I will.”

 The other bit his lip, but said nothing.

“What is it?” Harry prompted.

He shook his head. “Not now,” he said quietly. “I can’t—not now.”

That steely glint in the other man’s eye said enough.  It was the tell he gave right before he turned back into himself and into the forest that Harry was rapidly beginning to pick up on, and Harry refrained from pressing him as he had not done earlier in the conversation.

“I talked to Ron,” he said instead. “And Hermione. None of them have ever met someone with your description before, let alone know your name. Ron thinks I’m lonely. Hermione thinks you might be some sort of Veela, one that maybe I met in passing once who’s scrambled my brains trying to get me to fall in love. I sent a letter to Luna, but…I’m not sure what she thinks yet.” He scratched his head helplessly. “She hasn’t sent anything back. Whatever it will be though, I hope it’s not nargles.”

The other man laughed in surprise, and the sound was like bells in Harry’s ears. His mirth drained some of the tension in his shoulders, though his right hand stayed rubbing the creamy skin on his left forearm anxiously. “Of course it will be, it’s Loony Lovegood.”

Harry raised his eyebrows. “You know what they called her in school?” All he seemed to be doing was asking questions, every time he came here.

His small smile faded somewhat. “I was there, once.”

Harry nodded. Of course he had been. Harry just couldn’t fucking _remember_ it _._ He had an ache in his chest, an urge to hold this strange and beautiful man that felt familiar, and it could have been, once. He stepped closer to him once more, so close their faces were nearly touching. The other man stared up at him in askance, a soft question on his face, the grey in his eyes clear and beautiful from so close, like smooth stones in a river, like gems set in silver.

“Our relationship. It was like the one in the story.” It was a statement, not a question.

“Not for a long time. And then it was, yes. Though hopefully ours ends differently.”

“Can you tell me anything?” What could have possibly created this? This ephemeral vision, this ethereal man telling him they used to know each other, maybe even love each other? _Why_ did he have no memory of him? Why? _Why?_

Harry was so frustrated, he could have screamed. But he knew he couldn’t afford to rail against the injustice of their predicament—it would just waste precious time.

 “War is what caused this,” the blonde man said, looking exhausted. Bluish bruises underscored his grey eyes. “War and bitterness.”

Harry stiffened at that. He couldn’t imagine him participating—not because he didn’t think he was powerful enough to fight, because he definitely was, there was no question. Harry could sense the magic surrounding him, wild and twisting. But that was exactly why Harry didn’t think he would fight, either.

 He was human in his sarcasm, his bite and mercurial moodiness. His mannerisms were familiar, his expressions captivating. But there was an otherworldly elegance in his movements that pointed of an overabundance of magic, too much to be human, and usually magical creatures were wary of involving themselves in human affairs. Harry wondered if Hermione was onto something, with the whole Veela thing. Maybe this person was a different sort of Veela, even farther removed than most he knew. After all, she was usually right.

“You were involved?” Harry asked, his voice rather hushed in surprise

The blonde man barked a harsh laugh at that and swatted his hand away, for a moment all elegance lost. “Yeah, Potter,” he said bitterly, biting the words and spitting the consonants. “I was involved.”

“How?”

He glowered. “No one knows.”

Harry grunted in frustration, screwing his eyes shut and dragging a hand through his hair. “How am I supposed to figure any of this out unless you help me?”

“I’m _trying_ , it’s not my fault you’re dense,” he muttered crossly, dropping Harry’s hand abruptly. “Besides, we have plenty of time, since we have none here.”

Harry shook his head and gritted his teeth, ignoring the riddle for the moment. “But…I how am I supposed to figure any of this out?”

He shrugged. “I’m everywhere,” he said unhelpfully, moodiness written in his every move as he walked away. “When you’re supposed to find me, you will. If you’re good enough.”

He left Harry alone in the clearing, grinding his teeth to dust trying not to shout.

_He really can be annoying._

 

_*_

 

Harry woke up alone and irritated, with a profound and urgent sense of apprehension gnawing at his gut. He was distracted all through his morning routine, dropping the eggs from the fridge and getting them all over the floor and forgetting to put coffee grounds in the filter, not realizing until he tried to take a sip. Ziti slithered onto a chair by the dining room table, tasting the air.

“Not a good morning?” he asked dryly.

“No,” Harry replied moodily, aggressively smearing butter on his toast. He didn’t deign to elaborate.

“Well, _I_ made a new friend,” Ziti bragged.

“Really?” Harry grunted around most of his piece of much too buttery toast as he shoved it in his mouth. “Who?”

“Don’t eat like a heathen. He’s the fox from the other day,” Ziti hissed happily. “He promised not to bite me if I promised not to eat him.”

Harry side-eyed him. “You swallow your food whole,” he retorted. “You don’t get to comment on my table manners. And that sounds like a lasting friendship.”

Ziti preened, ignoring Harry’s first comment. “I like him. He’s got attitude.”

Harry heard a _thunk_ , and turned to see the little fox he’d helped standing on his back legs, one paw propped up against the window and bottle-brush tail swishing back and forth. His eyes blinked at him intelligently from behind the glass.

Harry hesitated, but eventually shrugged and turned back away, putting his pans in the sink to wash later. “Attitude is fine, just don’t get rabies.”

“What are rabies?” Ziti asked quizzically.

“It’s—oh!” Harry cast a quick tempus and nearly bashed his knee on the table—fumbling around in an irritated funk had cost him much more time than he’d anticipated. He hurried past the snake to get on his uniform, realizing just how late he was running, and didn’t have time to reply.

As he spun around the floo, he heard again, softly but with much more irritation, “What are _rabies_?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello friends!
> 
> I just wanted to say here that although Draco's mood at the beginning of this chapter remains a bit mysterious, I do plan on elaborating on what caused his upset further along in the story. Because Draco can't directly talk about what he does with the fae to Harry, it's left for poor Harry to figure it out by himself - a sticky situation for two boys who are already bad at communication. 
> 
> Hope you enjoyed the chapter, happy reading! :)


	4. Chapter 4

 Harry closed his file and sighed for about the fifth time in as many minutes. He couldn’t focus and it was killing him. He really needed to get this report written—it was supposed to be twenty pages long, and right now all he had was two. 

All he could think about was the man from his dreams, which almost made him groan aloud with how cliché it sounded. But, _Merlin_ , wouldn’t it be fantastic if he could meet him in person, if he could be there, even if he was acting like the right git he had been for the past few nights.

It was odd to try to picture him outside of the forest—he seemed to be such a part of it, it didn’t feel natural taking him out. That didn’t stop Harry, however. The thought of him was a much more appealing picture than the one his desk made, stacked and stressfully demanding with papers and files.

He was splattering his ink all over his papers, twirling his pen in his fingers and in the middle of a daydream involving a particularly irksome blonde underneath said piled desk doing something much more gratifying with his mouth than spitting insults when a commotion started in the corridor that distracted him from his reverie. He was about to check it out when Ron ran into the doorway of their office, breathless and disheveled.

“We’ve been called in,” Ron said in a rush. “Potions bust. Nearly everyone our level and up is heading out. We gotta go, now.”

Harry was up and out the door before he’d even finished his sentence.

 

_*_

 

Streams of angry red and orange zinged past Harry’s head as he crouched behind a stack of crates in a dank cellar off of Knockturn. Something to his right exploded with a shouted _Diffindo_ and he jerked to the left, huddling closer in with Ron.

“Why do they always have to use the Blasting spells,” Ron muttered distractedly, shooting a few stunners quickly over the crates before ducking down once more, trying to crumple his large frame small enough to fit the cramped corner he found himself in and just barely succeeding.  

“We’ve warded off all the exits,” Harry said, peering past the crates to the rest of the room and lurching backwards as a jinx ricocheted inches away from his ear. “They’re trying to blast their way out.”

Harry was practically vibrating with adrenaline but his legs were going numb. They’d held these positions far too long. They would have to do something drastic to distract their opponents, something—

In rapid succession, there was a huge bang, a loud crash, and a piercing scream.

“Wha—” Ron began before Harry yanked roughly on his partner’s cloak.

“Go!” Harry said, his voice rough, before he began firing stunners as fast as he could. Within five minutes, the entire room was cleared.

He and Ron sprinted over to where they’d heard the shriek, met by a frantic Auror Moriarty. She had a few cuts and scrapes, but didn’t seem worse for wear except for her bloodless face, wide eyes, and the copious amounts of red on her hands spread all the way up to her elbows.

“Do you have the portkey?” she asked, her voice shrill. “To St Mungo’s?”

Harry fished his clunky, battered can opener out of his pocket, clumsy with haste, and offered it to her. He would learn later that Moriarty’s had fallen out of her pocket during a chase, and Stone’s had been cut in two by a severing curse—one that unfortunately had hit him as well.  

The two of them had gotten caught in the ricochet, stranded away from Harry and Ron, and unfortunately for Stone he was placed just so that his left arm bore the brunt of a nasty severing spell. The stump of what was left hung uselessly from his shoulder, cut off an inch or so above the elbow. He thankfully passed out just moments afterwards from pain and shock.

Moriarty had stopped the wound from bleeding uncontrollably by wrapping it in her cloak and securing it with a tight _Ferula_ , though as they were whisked away by the portkey, Harry could see it was already bleeding through. He and Ron stood in silence next to each other for a few beats, processing what they had just witnessed, unable to consider much else.

“C’mon,” Ron eventually said, clapping a hand on Harry’s shoulder. “We have to take these guys in.”

It took Harry a bit longer than his friend to tear his eyes away from the stark red pool that stained the grey concrete. He needed time to get over the swooping sensation in his stomach that was plaguing him.

He didn’t like how the sight of it pulled the strings at the back of his mind, fraying something.

 

_*_

 

Harry returned home feeling distinctly upset and unsettled.

Ziti was less than sympathetic. Really, he should have gotten a more affectionate pet than a snake. Perhaps a dog. A large one he could take on runs with him. A Golden Retriever, he thought. Even if they were a bit dopey, they always seemed so happy and eager to please.

Unfortunately, his very intelligent snake was neither at the moment.

“He wants to come back inside,” Ziti said the moment Harry opened the door, pointing with his tail through the window where the little fox sat politely with his head cocked slightly to the side, looking like he was on his best behavior.

“He’s a wild animal,” Harry muttered gruffly, tossing his bag onto the couch. “He can stay outside.”

“That’ssss not what he says,” the snake pouted.

Harry sighed. “Just, not now, alright?”

The snake tilted his head, his tongue darting in and out of his mouth, tasting the air. “Messy day at work.”

Harry nodded. “Stone lost his arm.”

The snake nodded his head thoughtfully. “I do not have any arms.”

“Yes, but…” Harry began exasperatedly, before realizing that his protests would fall upon deaf ears. Ziti had already turned back to the window. Harry wasn’t quite sure how they were communicating, considering no Parseltongue was being spoken from what Harry could hear, but from the emphatic nods and the sounds of small nails clacking on the glass they seemed to be figuring each other out just fine.

Harry put on the kettle for tea and took a steaming hot shower, hoping the scorching water would burn away some of the gore that he felt still clung to him. Once he toweled himself off and got himself in his comfiest t-shirt and sweatpants, alongside some ridiculous slippers Ginny had bought him for his birthday, he huddled with his tea on the couch. The telly was on, but he didn’t watch it. Scenes from that day replayed over and over again, Stone’s prone form, the blood on the concrete…

He felt a small tap on his knee and looked down into wide silver eyes blinking at him.

“Ah—Ziti!” Harry said accusingly, twisting to look at his snake, who had the good graces to appear at least a little repentant. “How the hell did you even let him in?”

Ziti didn’t have shoulders to shrug with, but if he did, he would most certainly have used them in this moment. “He’s very persuasive.”

The fox gently butted his head against Harry’s leg, quite like a cat would, and patted his knee once more.

Harry sighed and spelled a quick diagnostic charm over the fox, making sure he was as clean this time as he was the last. He was, though the magic seemed to surprise him, making him shiver and sneeze. Harry gave him a little smile.

“Well, I suppose you can stay here,” he said tiredly. “But only for one night.”

Delighted, the fox cuddled right up into his lap. He circled around trying to get comfortable, finally resting his chin on Harry’s thigh and looking up at him guilelessly before butting his head a few more times into his leg, rubbing his thick, soft fur into Harry’s best pair of sweatpants and rolling over to expose his white belly, all which shocked the person he was lying on. Certainly he had some sort of survival instincts that weren’t functioning as they should have been.

“You’re a strange little creature,” he murmured, but scratched the fox on the ears anyway, and he seemed content enough. Harry wasn’t about to pet the fur on his tummy—soft as it looked, he wasn’t about to risk doing so if it got him bit by those sharp teeth.

If Harry was being honest with himself, having a furry animal to pet was a bit more reassuring than petting Ziti—perhaps because he knew there would be no verbal barbs thrown his way—and as the images of Stone lying bloodied on the concrete began to morph into someone else, bloody and raw, immobile and broken on wet tiles, Harry sorely needed the comfort.  

He stared at the wall for hours and hours after night fell, sitting on the couch, unwilling to move to his bed and dislodge the small creature in his lap as he pushed his fingers through his thick fur and tried valiantly but fruitlessly to stave off sleep. As slumber gradually engulfed him, he found himself thinking for the first time that he would rather have his old nightmares tonight than have to face his companion.

At least he knew his nightmares for what they were.

 

The blood on the cement floor—the blood on the bathroom tiles… it changed everything.

 


	5. Chapter 5

His companion was lying in the sun this time, his arms stretched above his head, his silvery hair glinting in the light. One arm was flung across his eyes. He was so pale, Harry wanted to carry him into the shade at the edge of the clearing where he wouldn’t be burned.

He uncovered one eye enough to glide over Harry lazily as he entered the clearing and gave him a warm smile as he sat up. “Alright?”

“You’re feeling better today,” Harry remarked rather sourly.

He didn't deign to respond directly, instead scrutinizing Harry pensively as he pulled his bottom lip between his teeth. “Something happened,” he said slowly. “But something has happened with you, too?”

Harry looked him in surprise. “How do you know?”

“You’re unsettled,” he replied. “The forest knows it. And the smell of fear lingers on you.”

“You can smell that?”

He cocked his head. “Yes.”

Well, if Harry needed any further confirmation that his companion wasn’t truly human, this was it. “I see," he said, although he didn't. 

“Why?”

Harry didn’t know what to think anymore, not after the flash of what he thought was genuine. He had thought that if something would spark anything resembling a memory with this being who spoke to him with such endearment and charm, it would have been a teasing kiss, a beguiling smirk, a romantic silhouette perhaps.

Instead, he stared at Stone in horror, seeing the red drip starkly onto the concrete, and he remembered.

 “You were bleeding.”

His companion's head whipped around and his shoulders stiffened abruptly, arms bracing him from behind. There were leaves stuck in his hair and dirt on his arms. He didn’t seem to notice, though, his sharp gaze focused only on Harry. “Where?”

“On a tile floor. There was water, everywhere. I was…I was screaming things. Myrtle was shrieking.” Harry took a deep, shaky breath. “Did I do that?” he asked fearfully, his voice wavering, tinged with anxiety and determination. “Did I kill you? Are you a ghost? Is that why you’re here?”

“Harry.” He was walking towards him, reaching out to him. He was pursing his lips in worry and furrowing his brow. “Harry. Stop that, no. No, that’s not it. You know it’s not. Fuck. ” He held out his hands like he wanted to hold him but was, for the first time, unsure. “I’m not a ghost, Harry. I already told you the story. Don’t go worrying yourself into a state.”

 “I did it though,” Harry said with conviction. He didn’t know how he knew, only that he did. The withering curl of guilt which engulfed his stomach whenever he brought himself back to that moment confirmed it. “I did it, didn’t I?”

Cloudy grey eyes met his own. “Yes,” he said cautiously. “You did.”

“Why?” Harry didn’t know what to think, what to feel.

His companion’s lips twitched in the anemic appropriation of what should have been a reassuring smile. “You were doing what you had to.”

“And you?”

“I was doing what I had to too.”

“I don’t understand.” Harry wanted to run away. This was too much. He hadn’t even meant to hurt Voldemort, not really—well, he knew that he had to kill him, but he didn’t know an _Expelliarmus_ could kill anyone, not until it did. He’d fought with Dudley before, but Dudley had deserved it. And he hadn’t sliced him up like deli meat either.

But Harry had never been good at running from things, and the soothing hands running worriedly over his brow and through his hair grounded him.

“That was the beginning of the end of many things,” the other man said, smoothing one of Harry’s numerous cowlicks over and over in an attempt to make it lie flat.  “One part of our relationship was killed after I wasn’t. And another was brought to life.”

“But what happened? Why did I hurt you? Why would I ever _want_ to hurt you like that?”

“Before, I thought I could get by on my own. After that, I realized I couldn’t.” He shrugged. “It’s that simple. Is the enemy of my enemy my enemy? My acquaintance? Certainly never friends,” he said with a smirk, “…but something more, perhaps?”

Harry swallowed heavily. “We weren’t on the same side of the war.”

Draco regarded him with care. “I was not on yours,” he said, his words measured, “but I was not on the Dark Lord’s when it mattered, either. By that time, I’d found a new master.”

Harry slowly nodded. As the conversation continued, some of his anxiety faded, though he was still queasy and unsettled. “The fae.”

“I believe it was their whim, not yours, which fell so heavy handed in that confrontation,” he confided in him, his fingers tightening slightly for a moment before resuming their gentle pattern. “We are all pawns to them, Harry. They care nothing for anyone but themselves.”

“How?”

“She had sensed that I wavered,” Draco said, his eyes dark and brow furrowed. “Do you remember much of what occurred before?”

“No,” Harry said honestly.

“You’d found me crying,” Draco explained. “I was overwhelmed and horribly humiliated. My wand no longer worked well—wands are made for those who are fully human, or close enough to it, and I was not so any longer—so I used the harshest spell I could think of to scare you into leaving, though I doubt it would have worked. You responded in kind, but your wand had no qualms like mine did.” He sighed. “If I had known then what I know now, or if I had been the person I am now, I would have responded differently and we wouldn’t have had to suffer. Though I do quite like them,” he added with a small smirk, preening slightly as though he couldn’t help it, hoping to shake the gloom which made Harry’s expression so morose. “The scars, I mean. I think they make me rather roguish looking. A rapscallion of sorts.”

 Harry had to scoff. “Anyone fitting of that description doesn’t use it for themselves.”

The other man turned his head and shrugged proudly, tugging on a lock of Harry’s hair as he moved. “Perhaps I’ve had a change of heart,” he said. “I can’t help my upbringing, but I have the heart and soul of a dashing scoundrel. I do believe I was a pirate in another life. Preferably a very handsome one who met a brave yet tragic end. Perhaps fighting Blackbeard. Defending a long-lost lover. Or maybe trying to keep my ship afloat in a hurricane. Yes, laugh all you want. But I know I’m right.”

Harry was indeed laughing, quite hard at that, too. That accent and those mannerisms, even the way he held himself screaming high society…pirates would have eaten him alive. But Harry let him indulge. And if he laughed a little too hard, well, he needed something to laugh about just then.

Harry missed the wide smile of relief and the sag in the other man’s shoulders. He knew he was putting too much pressure on poor Harry. He’d been through so much already, and he hadn’t meant to be so distant and moody—he’d had it all planned out beforehand, to tell Harry the story, to play the part of the perfect, compliant damsel in distress, to win the fairytale prince’s affections and get saved and all that rubbish. 

What fresh, steaming bullshit. Draco had the distressed part down pretty well if he said so himself. He felt like he was nearly always in that state or at least approaching it nowadays, but he could never be a damsel, and he had always been obstinately contrary. Having to ask Harry for help at all grated on his sensibilities.

Not to mention the fiasco the other night with the other changeling girl. He hadn’t meant to seek out Harry in dreams, that night—he’d known his emotions were far too tumultuous then to be good company. He had even gotten into a quarrel with Rouqine over nothing in particular, which he almost never did—she was usually so kind, she never irritated him enough to make him want to. Even without that, she was powerful and knowledgeable enough that he knew she could squish him like a bug whenever he got on her nerves. But he had been driven by the irrational part of him that day. It was that part of him which had reached out to Harry regardless of what the rest of him wanted, and it was that part of him that his magic seemed to be unfortunately most closely tied to.

He was trying hard not to obscure Harry’s own life and feelings with his own. It was difficult for him, the spoilt only child that he once was still rearing his bratty head every once in a while—but he was trying. Merlin knew, Harry deserved that little bit, at least. 

Which is why, as Harry finished laughing, the blonde took his head in his hands and kissed his lips, his cheeks, his forehead, his neck. He peppered kisses everywhere, hoping it would be enough to reassure him.

And, miraculously, it very nearly was.

 

_*_

 

 It took a little longer than Harry expected to reach Luna, off in the Argentinian wilderness searching for the next bizarre creature to recount in the Quibbler. She finally responded to the owl he sent her many days afterwards. The wait had been grueling for Harry, feeling as though every second was precious. Her letter back was short and serene, asking him to come by a café for tea and talk about what was bothering him.

He felt a bit safer talking about his odd dreams to Luna than either Ron or Hermione, especially as they increased in frequency. They would certainly believe him—that wasn’t the issue. It was that they would be too worried for him—Hermione would mother him about whether or not he was getting enough sleep, and fret over his lack of free time outside the Auror corps. Ron might try to set him up again, the thought of which made Harry shudder. After learning Harry liked blokes just as well as women, Ron had immediately started searching for a suitable replacement for Ginny. Every person he picked seemed perfectly compatible with Harry, which is exactly why they never worked out. Everyone he met was considerate, nice, _polite_. They restrained themselves. Sometimes, more often outside of those Ron picked for him, they _deferred_ to him. Which, of course, Harry detested. It left a sour taste in his mouth, to see people so eager to please him. 

Luna greeted him with a wide smile in her preferred café, an odd little place that Harry could never seem to get the hang of. He always (dubiously) let Luna choose his drink for him, because it seemed there was very little by the way of a regular cup of coffee or tea here.

Once they had both gotten there drinks (Harry was eyeing his warily, a mug of something letting off purple steam) and sat down, Luna immediately asked, “So, what’s up?”

“This is going to sound strange,” Harry began, to which Luna responded with a bright smile, “The most interesting things always do.”

He started with his very first dream, recounting the bizarre familiarity and attraction he had tying him to the man he dreamt of. He continued all the way up to the very last conversation they had, just after the flash of something truly real.

After he was done describing his bizarre night episodes, Luna looked pensive for a while.

“White blonde hair?” she asked, in that wandering way of hers that made Harry wonder if she was addressing him or just thinking aloud. “Grey eyes? Was he tall? Thin?”

“Yes,” Harry replied.

Luna took out her phone—most witches and wizards in the modern age had one, now. The Ministry had put up wards so they could be used without magical interference, struggling to keep up with the technological advancements that threatened to put muggles ahead of wizards in terms of efficacy and efficiency. And for a witch especially like Luna, who traveled willy-nilly chasing myths and legends and freak sightings all over the globe, having a means to stay in contact was crucial. Harry figured belatedly that he should have probably tried getting a phone before he tried the owlry, but he was a man of habit and it was too late now anyway.

Luna tapped a bit into the search bar and scanned the _Daily Prophet_ ’s website, searching through the pages and pages of newspaper until she found one headlining “Narcissa Malfoy Hosts Fundraiser for Muggleborn Charity”.

There were two women in the photo. One looked startlingly like Bellatrix Lestrange, but her eyes were much kinder, her demeanor inviting—Teddy’s grandmother Andy. Harry would know her anywhere. He tried to go visit at least once a week or so, to keep up with his godson and see what they needed help with.

She was standing next to a statuesque woman with similar striking features, piercing blue eyes, and immaculately styled fine blonde hair. She didn’t smile, necessarily, but Harry could tell there was warmth in her eyes as she looked away from the camera and at Andromeda.

“Narcissa Malfoy,” Harry muttered, staring at the woman he’d saved from Azkaban. He never knew why she had lied to Voldemort’s face to save him—he’d only been glad she did, because otherwise he certainly would have been dead for good at the end of the night. But in the past, when he had tried to focus on her face, it seemed washed out, blurry, as if looking at her without his glasses on. Now, with a photo of her right in front of him, looking at the way she stood, the way she moved…

“How do you know her?” Harry asked.

Luna shrugged. “She makes quite large donations to the Magical Rehabilitation Center for Creatures in Need that I used to work with after Hogwarts for a year or so. She liked the birds best.”

“Did she have a son?”

Luna raised her eyebrows. “I suggest that is something you ask her,” she said. “I never saw anyone who looked like him in school, though their family was very strict in their beliefs—maybe they had him with tutors, and then sent him off during the war and then he never returned. But that’s just speculation on my part.”

“Yeah…” Harry nodded absently. He stared at the moving photo of Narcissa through the phone screen.

“She is a pureblood, though,” Luna said breezily. “From what myths I’ve heard, they tend to be the first targets for these sorts of things.”

“What sort of things?”

Luna shrugged. “Disappearances, love affairs, murders. You name it. He called the creatures he lives with fae?”

“Well, I did. He didn't refute me, though.”

Luna nodded. “They have many names throughout the world,” she said. “From what I’ve seen, word of them comes in many different shapes and sizes—which is only fitting of them, considering they thrive on confusion. Certain places are more inhabited than others. I’m sure, if Narcissa proves to be a dry well so to speak, you could talk to Seamus. He was more than happy to share some of the stories he grew up hearing about with me.”

Harry felt as though he was going to burst. With excitement, or maybe impatience, possibly apprehension, or most likely a mix of all three. Finally, something tangible.

It seemed he had a lead. 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey friends! Thank again to everyone who leaves reviews, I love reading your wonderful comments! I don't have anyone beta-ing this work, so I really appreciate hearing what others have to say :)


	6. Chapter 6

 

Draco could not stop thinking about the Changeling girl.

When he brought her up to Rouqine, she simply told him to stop wasting his energy. It was enough to try to live in this place and survive, but to worry over another? That was simply too much.

“You worry over me,” he pointed out.

Her smile was a sour, puckered thing. “I stopped trying to live here ages ago, darling.”

Despite her, he could not stop perseverating. Over and over, he saw her on loop, here one minute, gone the next.

She’d had an innocence he hadn’t expected, holding her as they were whisked away. Despite her parents’ fading cries, she was remarkably silent as she grasped and snatched at the air in front of Draco’s face, trying in vain to latch onto his hair, or his nose, or maybe even his eyes, perhaps—he wasn’t certain how sophisticated she was yet.

The Queen had torn her from him, but not before he had seen what was to become of her.

There was a strange linimal space created in that gap between time and no time. The rapid current of the human world’s timekeeping spilled over and pooled in it. With nowhere to go, no future or past, it made endless loops of itself, manic and narcissistic, never decaying. One could sense them in places that seemed off somehow, the atmosphere mournful and full of static regardless of the day or time. Those places which seemed inexplicably as though belonged elsewhere, so much so it made the hair on the back of one’s neck raise.

It was here that she was whisked back to. Never to age, never to become the woman she was meant to be. She would be immortal, but she would never know it. Innocent. Forever.

It was these places that Draco became interested in. Loops in time, a detour of the relentless current that forever spiraled, going nowhere. Black holes to eternity.

Infants locked in immortality.

Draco searched.

 

_*_

 

The next day, as soon as Harry had time after work, he left to see Narcissa Malfoy.

He wasn’t quite sure how to act around her, what to wear or do—he’d never really interacted with anyone from terribly high society except at Ministry functions, where he had to wear those horribly itchy robes Hermione insisted he buy and plaster a painfully fake smile on his face while his grip on the drink he held became steadily tighter from strain as the event progressed.

He wondered for a little while, but eventually reckoned that the best impression he could have made was saving her from Azkaban, and whatever he did now most likely couldn’t overshadow that. So he put on his regular t-shirt and jeans and apparated over to the Manor in Wiltshire.

The last time he had been here, he remembered with a shudder as the gates to the property opened with a House Elf waiting to accompany him, was during the war after he’d been caught by the Snatchers. It was only Hermione’s quick thinking that had saved them (despite how uncomfortable having a stinging and swollen face had been for Harry) and the good fortune that no one there had been able to recognize him before they were able to fight their way out.

Harry felt a pang as he walked with the House Elf to the main entrance, thinking of Dobby.

“Are you treated well here?” Harry asked, hoping he wouldn’t inspire any sort of self-inflicted punishments on the poor elf.

“Oh yes, Mistress is very kind,” the elf assured him. “She treats all elves very well.”

“That’s good to hear,” Harry said, thinking back and realizing that with Lucius in Azkaban, Narcissa would be the sole human inhabitant of the Manor now. “I’m glad.”

“Mistress is still getting ready,” the elf said, leading him through the grand foyers with vaulted marble ceilings and echoing floors and into a homier area—though still quite elegant, much more so than anything Harry would certainly ever own—with a table set for evening tea. “Does Mister Harry Potter need anything from Binky as he waits?”

“No, thank you, I think—well, actually,” Harry paused, remembering Dobby and all the insights and power he concealed within his slight frame.  Perhaps Bitsy could help him more than anyone. “If it’s not too much trouble to ask, did your Mistress ever have a son?”

Bitsy’s large eyes widened impossibly and he—she? Harry wasn’t sure—twisted one of his ears. “That is none of Bitsy’s business to be telling, Mister Harry Potter,” he replied earnestly. “We is not talking about that, no sir. That is out of Bitsy’s hands, that is.”

“But…” Harry trailed off, wanting desperately to press the elf for more information but not wanting to distress him. “Alright, I understand.”

With that, the elf disapparated with a _crack_ , leaving Harry to himself until Narcissa was ready for his company.

 _I suppose that at least tells me I’m on the right track,_ Harry thought.

He looked around the room curiously, wondering how anyone could actually live in a place as resplendent as this. Just sitting in the midst of so many expensive things made his spine straighten and his hands clasp in his lap with the fear that he might accidentally knock something over, and he was twenty-four years old. He wondered what his companion’s childhood must have been like.

Was he allowed to play like a normal child? Did he romp around in the dirt, did he play sports, did he have friends who tromped around the garden and tracked mud into the house? Or was he kept pristine and put on display, like so many other beautiful things in this house?

When Narcissa Malfoy appeared in the doorway, Harry was struck by how perfectly she fit her surroundings. Like her home, she was beautiful, untouchable, and cut from marble.

Harry stood and shook her hand. “Thank you for meeting with me,” he said. “I apologize for interrupting.”

“No worries,” she replied, her smile revealing nothing as she gracefully sat across from him and poured herself some tea. “What can I do for you, Mister Potter?”

“What I’m about to ask may seem a bit odd,” he warned cautiously, feeling it was better to jump in with both feet instead of waste time trying to figure out a more sensitive way to ask, “but did you ever have a son?”

Her eyebrows flew up, and for a moment, her emotionless façade fell. Her stare was laser-like in focus, her consonants crisp and sharp as she replied, “Why do you ask?”

“Well…” Harry chewed his lip, wondering if he should confess all of his dreams to her. “I believe I’ve met him.”

She reached out and clutched his hand faster than a viper striking, as though to hold him fast in case he vanished before her eyes. “Where? When? When was this?”

“So you do have a son,” Harry said, wanting first to make sure he knew this much—so little, really—before continuing.

“Yes,” she said tersely. “Yes, I do.”

“He—he comes to me,” Harry confessed. “At night, in dreams…It felt so _real_ , but I had to be sure.”

“What has he said?” Her voice was steady, but urgent, and her grip on his hand was becoming painful. Harry allowed it anyway.

“He wants me to meet him,” Harry said. “He wants me to help him.”

“You will,” she said, a question hidden within the wobbly certainty in her words.

“I’ll try.”

She pressed her free hand to her mouth and leaned back in her seat, closing her eyes and taking deep, steadying breaths. “His name is Draco,” she said, her voice soft and her brows drawn.

“Draco,” Harry repeated, turning the word over in his mouth, echoing it in his mind. He thought of his nighttime companion and the name seemed to click into place, as much a distinctive part of him as his wit or his grace or his turbulent, mercurial way of being. _Draco. Of course he is._

“What happened to him?” Harry asked when she seemed a bit more collected. Honestly, Harry was impressed at how much composure she retained. She seemed obviously overwhelmed.

“The war,” she said, clenching her jaw. “My baby, he—The Dark Lord asked too much of him. He pushed him too far. That is the only thing I can think of.”

“He fought with you?” Harry asked, needing to untangle the strings of riddles that ran in knots through his head.

“For a time,” she said. “But he had to leave before the fighting really began in earnest.”

“Had to leave where?”

She sighed and blinked slowly at her untouched cup of tea before fixing him with another one of her piercing gazes. “What do you know about Changelings, Mister Potter?”

 

_*_

 

As Harry left the Manor, he thought of Narcissa, alone and plagued with the blurry memories of a child that magic had tried to wipe away, hoping that one day, somehow, he would find his way back to her. She had lost the war, and not the one they all had fought in—she didn’t want to start another battle. She knew she would lose this one as well.

But Harry knew something as well. He knew he wouldn’t.

 _Draco_ , he thought, staring into the depths of the forest.

_I’ll find you._

Harry was done waiting.


	7. Chapter 7

 

Harry wandered through the forest, tense and waiting for something to happen. Perhaps he would find Draco. Perhaps he would find another fae. Maybe even the Queen herself. It felt much like the nightmares he used to have, before his slumber was filled with more pleasant company.

He knew the fae were powerful, enough so that even the Elves were frightened of them. But Voldemort had been powerful, and he’d defeated him.

He could do this. He would find Draco.

After that, he’d think of something.

The forest was silent as he walked, deathly so. Nothing moved; not even a single leaf fluttered in the breeze, and he missed the sound. It was as though all the creatures of the forest had stowed themselves away in their homes, never to reveal themselves—as though they could sense a building storm, electricity rising in the air. It made Harry shudder with the creeping unnaturalness of it. The shadows seemed darker in the stillness, pulling him in as though they had their own gravity, sinking around him like viscous black tar.

A hand grabbed his arm and he nearly splinched himself, almost apparating away in fright. His stomach jumped and rolled over nefariously, and he wondered if the contents of it were elsewhere.

The hand was small, but with long, capable fingers. It was connected to the freckled arm of a redheaded woman with wild curls and fierce, leonine features. The shadows clung to her as they clung to everything, but she wore them like a queen would a robe instead of letting them conquer her, and Harry knew she was not fully human.

“Who are you?” she asked. If Draco’s voice reminded him of rustling autumn leaves, hers was a rough river current eroding everything in its wake.

“Harry Potter,” he replied, but she was shaking her head.

“No,” she replied. “I don’t care for names. Who _are_ you?”

Harry searched her face, wondering what she wanted. “I’m here for Draco. I’ve come to find him.”

Her lips pursed and her grip tightened, nails like talons into the soft flesh of his arm. “You must leave.”

Harry set his jaw. “I have to find him.”

Two poles, equally stubborn, equally determined in their own way to protect someone they valued. For a moment, they stayed at a standstill, sizing each other up.

“And if you care, you will,” she replied, breaking the spell and stepping out of the shadows, rising to her full height. She was tall in stature, a striking figure. Despite himself, Harry felt rather intimidated. He knew a strong woman when he met one. After all, some of the most important people in his life were Hermione, Luna, Ginny and Molly Weasley. “But not now.”

“Why not?”

She looked at him as though he were stupid. It made him feel rather small, as though he were eleven and had been caught by McGonagall sneaking out late at night. “Your friend has told me much,” she said. “That you lived through a war. Tell me, did you fight it by yourself?”

“Well, no but—”

“Then do not think you can do this without damning yourself and condemning the man you care for.” Her tone was flinty and her words meant to cut, which they did. 

“I can’t wait,” Harry replied. “I don’t know when the seven years are up! I have to get to him now, when I have a chance.”

She looked at him down her nose, a familiar gesture that sent Harry flashes of an unpleasant sneer, harsh words yelled and spat from between corridors, a sharp hot pain in the center of his face as his nose broke.

He wondered how she could do that when she was about two inches shorter than him.

“You died in the forest,” she said with conviction.

Harry blinked in astonishment. “How do you know that?”

“The forest tells us things. The night you died was the night he did, as well.”

“Voldemort?...Or—”

“Not your Dark Lord,” she interrupted. “We both know who I mean. Do not use his name here—names are heavy things, they upset the balance of things, trigger magic you do not understand in the forest. If you continue, he may be called here. Him, or something worse.” She quirked a smile. “But you’re not afraid of that, I can hear it in the way you say that vile man’s name. Admirably brave, if admittedly foolish.”

At least Harry had this small thing, then. But his heart still sank low in his chest. “I need to see him.” _I need to know. I need to have him here, next to me, just to see him, just to touch him—_

Her eyes softened, just a fraction. “You will see him when he needs you. That is not right now.”

Harry felt his determination crack within him. “Is he safe, at least?” he asked helplessly. “Is he happy?”

“Where we live, happiness is fleeting,” she told him. “But he is safe, for now.”

“For now?”

“Stay here, and he may not be. The Queen does not tolerate disloyalty. If she knew what he was plotting…” she drifted off, her eyes glassy. “You must go to protect him.”

She turned to go, and the shadows nearly consumed her. But she seemed to think better of something, and looked back at Harry.

“No matter what he tells you,” she said, staring at him fiercely, “he deserves to get out. No matter what he says or what he thinks right now, you have to get him out. He _does not_ deserve this life. You must help him.”

“I never thought he did,” Harry replied uncertainly. “Why?”

“He harbors much guilt over the fate of the child who was supposed to be him,” she said. “More so now that the same thing has been repeated. He worries he is irreparably damaged. That he irreparably damages the world around him.” She squared her jaw and stared him down. “He worries you cannot love him.”

“I…” Harry was at a loss for words. “I did—I think I did. I’m sure—”

“Uncertainty is not _enough_!” she exclaimed, and the shadows seemed to expand. They had a frighteningly snake-like quality to them, but Harry doubted they understood Parseltongue. “I thought I was loved and I was not. If you are not going to help him, do not string him along. Do not give him false hope. If you care for him at all, do not torture him.”

“I won’t,” Harry assured her. “I’ll catch him.”

“But do you care for him enough to stay with him? Enough to make him want to stay with you, despite his insecurities?”

“Er…” Harry wasn’t sure what to say. The connection they had was strong, yes, and he cared for him—but did he love him?

“Because if you do not,” she warned, “The forest will always pull him back.  Have you not heard the stories?”

“Of what?”

She sighed in a very put-upon manner, the shadows draped around her elegantly and making her single raised eyebrow both graceful and devastating. “Of the selkies, the entrapped fae. The ones who live bound in a loveless life, torn away from their home, stripped of their second skin, caged by human men. The forest will always call to him, even if he is haunted by what he does here. Will you be enough to ensure that his efforts to escape do not complete in a  circle?”

“I…” Harry drifted off. “I don’t know,” he replied honestly. “But I’m not the only one who remembers him.”

“Who else?”

“His mother.”

She nodded slowly. “Those who we bargain for always remember us,” she said, her words halting and stalling from her mouth as though she did not want to let them go. “He must have traded her life for hers. She will always be close to the fae now, whether she knows it or not. Her fate is irrevocably entwined with theirs.”

“I…see.”

“Do you?” she pressed him. “Do you really? Can you continue to protect him, even after he leaves this place?”

Harry thought of their bickering, of the sharp words Draco was capable of wielding, of the angry fire that lived within him, of the melancholy which clung to him. He also thought of his rare smile, the bright one which lit up his face, of that ridiculous put-on arrogance and that hilarious sense of humor. He thought of the feel of his skin and his scorching kiss. “Until he wants me to stop, I can.”

She nodded curtly, motioning behind him. “The end of the forest is that way. Make haste. If you don’t, another might find you, and then all of this will have been for naught.”

He was obviously being dismissed. But Harry still had questions. “Wait!” he exclaimed, and she paused. “Why are you helping me? And why do you not speak in riddles, like Dr—like he does?”

She gave him a thin-lipped, wan smile. “I have had ages and eons to get used to this magic, to bend it as I see fit. It respects me in the same way it seeks to dominate our friend, and he does not yet have the tools or the wisdom to control rather than succumb.” She gave him another ominous, appraising look. “For his sake, I hope you take him away from here before he becomes like me. This is not a life, Harry Potter. This is an endless death.”

And then, before Harry could say another word, she became one with the forest and disappeared.   

 

_*_

 

In his dream, Harry was met with a strong winds and a troubled scowl. Draco was pacing around the clearing, circling in a way he seemed to have been doing for a great while if the footprints in the grass were any indication.

“You shouldn’t have come after me while you were awake,” Draco said with concern written on his expression and the wind circling with his steps, pushing his hair to and fro. “The Queen could have found you.”

“I had to try,” Harry replied. “I had to see you.”

“You can see me here,” he protested. “Harry, when I asked you to save me, I didn’t mean for you to go barreling into the forest and fight my enemies for me. I can fight those myself—I have to do that alone. I just need you to be there to catch me when I jump.” He stopped pacing for a moment to give a small smile to Harry and cocked his head. "Alright?”

Harry scoffed at himself. “I know this sounds terrible, coming from me compared to you, but…I got impatient.”

“Seven years’ night will come soon,” he said unhappily, continuing to pace slowly. “Please, Harry. I can do this. Wait for me.”

Harry let out a long sigh. “Draco…”

Draco’s steps ground to a stumbling halt, his head spinning from surprise and too much oxygen as he took a sharp inhale. He whipped his neck to turn to Harry so fast it must have been painful, his hands by open by his sides, his eyes wide and his mouth comically agape.

“What?” he breathed, staring. He couldn’t have heard correctly. No one had said his name in…seven years.

“Draco,” Harry repeated louder, walking towards him with outstretched hands.

With a sob, Draco launched himself into him. Harry stumbled back and they nearly fell to the ground. It was only Harry’s grasp that kept Draco upright when his knees buckled with the force of the emotions coursing through him as he clung to him.

“Say it again,” he demanded, and Harry did. Every time he said his name was punctuated afterwards by a bruising kiss salty with tears. He was happy, happier than Harry had ever seen him, but so emotional Harry was afraid he would work himself into some sort of state if he didn’t relax just a little.

Slowly Harry coaxed him down so they were sitting together. Draco’s arms and legs were wrapped around him in a tight embrace. The juxtaposition it made, this versus how Narcissa comported herself—how he was sure Draco had been trained to act. Harry marveled at how Draco let him see him. He wondered for the first time how it must have been being with Draco at the beginning of their relationship compared to now. Had he been distant? Prickly? Certainly difficult—he acted that way sometimes now. But it was difficult to think of him being so while he was wrapped around him so desperately.

“Nobody’s said my name in years,” he said thickly into Harry’s neck, sniffling delicately and trying to wipe the tears off his cheeks in a vain attempt to clean himself off. He gently took off Harry’s glasses and set them aside, pressing their foreheads together and carding his fingers through his hair. He pulled him in for yet another kiss, this one gentler than the others as the novelty of the situation began to wear away.

Draco cleared his throat so he could speak without his voice catching. “You remembered?” he asked.

“I talked with your mother.”

He stiffened in Harry’s arms. “Mum?” he whispered, the tone of his voice an echo of Narcissa’s when Harry mentioned her son. “How is she? Does she…” he swallowed. “Does she remember me?”

Harry nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, she does. She really loves you.” He watched Draco look to the sky to try to stop crying before giving in and burying his face in Harry’s neck once more. “She misses you.”

Draco shook in his arms. The breeze circled around them, tugging at their clothes and sifting through their hair and making Harry’s even more disheveled, carrying the scents of blooming flowers and just cool enough to make the bright sun pleasantly warm. Buttery light filled the clearing. 

It was brighter here than Harry had ever seen before.

Draco hid his face in his hands and wept.

 


	8. Chapter 8

 

The anniversary of the Battle of Hogwarts was approaching, and Harry was dreading it. He didn’t want to go to the pompous Ministry function they put on every single arduous year—he didn’t want to make a speech about bravery and togetherness in the face of their enemies. He had gotten better at public speaking over the years but he still didn’t feel like the leader they all wanted him to be. In the end, during the war, he was just a scared kid scrambling to survive.

He had been reluctant before, but after what Rouqine told him, he considered just skipping the whole thing. He couldn’t risk getting stuck there making nice with people he disliked while Draco was fighting his way out of the forest. He had to be there for him.

He tried to bring up the subject to first Hermione—who cut him off midsentence, saying that even though she agreed that at this point the ceremonies were too much, he was a symbol of hope and should be there no matter how much he despised those sorts of functions.  Ron just grunted and shrugged, as if to say _What can you do?_.

He had been trying to find the right moment to tell them about Draco, but they were always either at work or with the baby, neither of which was a good time to bring up the fact that Harry had a long-lost lover who no one knew about even though he had apparently gone to school with them. They mostly just assumed his odd dreams had dribbled away.

Harry’s thoughts kept tumbling over and over in his head, so much so he just needed to do something to tear his mind away. It was this that had made him vulnerable to Seamus’ endless invitations to the club he was currently regretting attending.

Seamus and Dean had disappeared somewhere off in the distance, leaving Harry at the bar. Seamus—much more so than Dean, who was a bit more laid-back about the whole thing—had made it a personal priority of sorts after finding out that Harry was attracted to both men and women to show him every nook and cranny of gay culture he could without getting caught by the wizarding paparazzi. Some of it had been interesting, but most of it had just made Harry want to go back home and huddle on the couch with some tea and a book. He didn’t exactly enjoy crowds.

He listened to the thumping music and tried to ignore the servers walking around in fishnets and slitted pants which left nothing to the imagination. He purposefully didn’t make eye contact with anyone, looking distant in the same sort of purposeful way he did while on the underground.

He fiddled with the buttons on his shirt and glanced around. This was wholly and entirely not his scene. Where was Dean when he needed him?

An attractive bloke walked over to Harry—perhaps swaggered over would be more appropriate—and asked him if he could buy him a drink. Harry refused, trying to be gentle about it.

The other man shrugged, not too perturbed. “Just in case you change your mind, I’ll be around. And,” he said with a wink, “I’ll be back here tomorrow night.”

 _‘I might not be here tomorrow night_ , _’_ a petulant voice said in his mind, and he remembered.

_‘Can you even walk?’ Harry looked down at the huddled figure in the bed. Laying there, he looked startlingly smaller than he ever did striding through the corridors and sneering at him from across long hallways. He looked disturbingly human, disheveled and exhausted, so unlike the haughty, untouchable front he put up._

_“Of course I can,” Draco sniffed._

_“Have you tried?” he asked cautiously, incredulousness and guilt twin snakes twisting in his belly._

_“I can walk,” Draco repeated with gritted teeth._

Harry blinked, and he was alone at the bar. Neither Draco nor the other man remained. He tossed back his last shot of honey whiskey, letting the oversweet burn of it ground him.

Next time he’d see Seamus, he’d apologize. Or maybe Seamus would apologize to him. Harry wasn’t quite sure which one was worse—abandoning a friend in uncharted waters, or ditching a night out without telling anyone.

As he left the bar with his head down, a couple in the cramped corridor next to the coat room blocked his only exit. The pulsing music and boosted bass of the other room was so loud it nearly made the walls vibrate and naturally was less than conducive to polite conversation. Harry tapped one of them on the shoulder and pointed to the exit.

The man he’d tapped, a shorter fellow with bleached and purposefully edgy white-blonde hair, gave him a nod and a lopsided, drunken smile before pressing into the wall and letting Harry go by.

“Thanks,” Harry shouted over the music.

“Don’t worry yourself,” the stranger yelled distractedly over his shoulder with a wave of his hand, turning back to the man he’d stepped away from to let Harry through.

The cold night air was a shock after the crowded, sweaty club. Harry shivered. He heard the other man’s words repeated back to him in his mind, in a different person’s voice.

_“Don’t worry yourself. They won’t do anything, not with Dumbledore around.” Draco looked a little shifty as he said this, and it made Harry worried._

_“Who are they?”_

_Draco shook his head, his lips pursed tightly. His eyes darted across Harry’s face and as Harry opened his mouth to ask something else, and Draco kissed him. It was a hurried sort of thing, all tongue and teeth, and Harry let out a noise of surprise. He knew this was supposed to divert his attention, but he didn’t much care. Recently Draco had been more withdrawn than before and hadn’t initiated as much. Harry worried that he was having regrets or preparing to go to Voldemort. So he kissed him back, as though that small act could keep him there longer._

_Unfortubately, when they parted, he couldn't restrain himself from saying “I know what you’re doing.”_

_Draco shrugged and smirked. “You aren’t stopping me.”_

_Harry kissed him again. “No,” he said against his mouth. “M’not.”_

Harry blinked, and an empty street stood before him, a single errant piece of rubbish pushed by the wind drifting by. He grimaced and stuck his wand out seconds before the Knight Bus came screeching to a halt by the kerb.

Harry knew who ‘they’ were now.

 

_*_

 

 “I’ve been remembering more,” Harry said. The flashbacks hadn’t stopped after he’d left the club, his head spinning from the information and (if Harry was honest) from a little bit too much drink. Flashes of blonde hair. He saw endless expanses of pale skin. Lilac bruises on an otherwise unblemished neck. Blonde hair, a bit too long, fanning around a face with stormy grey eyes and a poison smile.

He heard bickering. Sometimes teasing, sometimes not. From what he could see, what they’d had was rocky and difficult. But then, so was much of Harry’s life. To have anything come easy just wasn’t in his nature.

A wry smirk twisted Draco’s lips as he looked up at Harry’s approaching form. “I hope so.”

Harry kissed him, hard, like he’d wanted to do ever since he entered that overcrowded club full of sweaty people and drank too much overpriced whisky. Draco's lips tasted like autumn and cinnamon, parting in a small gasp from the intensity of Harry's actions. 

“I remember a lot,” he breathed, kissing the place just behind Draco’s jaw, drifting his fingers down his spine softly in the way he knew would make him arch and take a stuttering breath.

“I’ve told you that spot isn’t fair,” Draco murmured, but pulled Harry in closer by the shoulders, wrapping his arms around his neck. “You remember that? Prick.”

Harry hummed, drawing him in for another kiss, his hands un-tucking his button-down and running his hands across his back, feeling the muscles beside his shoulder blades, the notches in his spine, the divots at the side of it on the small of his back just before his arse that Harry used to kiss when they slept together.

Never one for subtlety and aided by the shots of honey whisky buzzing through his system, Harry trailed kisses down Draco’s neck meant to bloom in color. Peering mischievously at him, he murmured close to his ear, “I remember the sex.”

Draco barked a strangled laugh, feeling his face heat. Seduction was a wonderful means to make someone lose their way—he’d heard plenty of crude nothings fall out of people’s mouths during his time in the forest. But none of those people had been Harry. And back in Hogwarts, so long ago, they’d never talked about what they did. No questions were ever asked, no words were ever spoken aloud.

For someone who had lived eons in seven years and not quite lived at all, Draco felt this was surprisingly new and it made him feel stumbling and gawky. The feeling left him a little breathless and a little speechless, besides his firm and eager _“Yes”_ to Harry’s unasked question.

Draco had participated in the midnight revelry and forbidden festivals of the fae—he had been drunk off power, and magic, and sex. None of it had ever felt as good as Harry’s lips and tongue on his skin, the way he trailed kisses down his torso as he undid every button. When Harry took him into his mouth, Draco had to lean against the tree behind him and feel the ridged bark press into his back to make sure he hadn’t died.

Harry moved in a particular way that made his eyes roll and a low rasping sound escape unbidden from his throat. It was marvelous, that sort of pleasure which demanded intense and unobstructed focus—but after so long in anticipation, Draco wanted this to last, and he wasn’t sure he’d be able to do so if Harry continued.

“Stop,” he managed, threading his hands through Harry’s thick hair and tugging harder than he meant to, his coordination eroded by burgeoning ecstasy bearing down far too quickly. “Stop, stop.”

Harry met his eyes through crooked glasses and freed his mouth with a slick _pop_ that Draco found far too erotic. “Not good?”

Draco spluttered indelicately and laughed. “No, the opposite.”

“Ah.” Harry rose with a self-satisfied smirk, staying close, and kissed him instead.

Draco wanted to melt into the kiss but untangled himself anyway, forcing his brain to reconnect to his mouth in a way his addled mind did not want. There was a question he had to ask before he continued in good conscience.

“Do you…” Draco began hesitantly, reluctant to hear the answer if it was not the one he wanted. “Do you remember the Room of Hidden Things?” That one last time, that had been the beginning of the end for Draco in more than one way. It was important to him that Harry knew it.

“I remember we had a couch, and never had a proper bed,” Harry said. He didn’t mention the tear he’d seen roll down Draco’s cheeks, just as he hadn’t then. “Just like we still don’t.”

Draco smiled in relief and kissed him. “I wasn’t ready for one then.”

“I wasn’t either,” Harry replied, his breathing heavy. “Now, though…” He didn’t bother to finish his sentence as Draco pulled him down into the grass. Harry made quick work of Draco’s shirt and trousers, and he of his.

 _God_ , Harry didn’t know how he could have forgotten someone who looked like that. He stilled above him, tracing the lines of Draco’s body with his eyes hungrily, memorizing the dip of shadows between muscle, the rise and fall of the breath in his chest, the faint whitish sheen of the scars across his skin.

“Harry?” Draco asked, trying not to let the self-consciousness stain his voice like the flush stained his cheeks. Harry looked up to meet the question in his eyes and saw steel forming there, flashing shields that protected him from his insecurity.

“You’re gorgeous,” he replied swiftly, kissing Draco once more and again knocking his glasses askew. Before Draco got nervous, he needed to make him sure of his sentiments.

The answer seemed to satisfy Draco, who took the glasses off and placed them in the grass beside them, purposefully ignoring the compliment which had left him tongue-tied. He halfheartedly scolded himself—it wasn’t like he was some blushing virgin, after all—but it seemed like everything Harry did made him more flustered than anyone else he could remember. At least when they were just fucking, he could convince himself that was all it was, but this lavish attention made his own feelings abundantly and embarrassingly clear.

This time was not like the others. During the others, Draco had felt like each of his movements were restrained, that he was restricted to looking and touching only certain parts of Harry, only doing enough to satisfy his desire without revealing his affection. Attempting this had left him hopelessly mal-à-droit. He had hidden his awkwardness under a veneer of dispassionate objectification, as though he was simply using Harry for his own gratification—something that Harry, of course, could never stand by. The git hadn’t even done it the Gryffindor way: he hadn’t confronted Draco about it or fought him. Instead, he made him _love_ him, and then it had just happened and broke everything else.

 _Merlin_ , he felt so torn up and vulnerable, but so light all at once. It didn’t matter that when he touched Harry it was a caress instead of a bruising grip—it didn’t matter that when he kissed Harry, he felt like he finally found something to believe in. It felt reverent, with none of religion’s ritual but all of its sacrality.

And it didn’t matter, because Harry touched him the same way.  

Clumps of grass pressed into his back and dirt got in his hair, but as they began all he could feel was Harry, above him, around him, within him. He was overwhelmed and splintering, too lost to find words, reduced to something more basic, more primal. Something like the midnight moon between the bloodstained branches, draped in red and white and black. Something like that first night with the fae, spinning and twisting, dancing without restraint, lost to the wild, errant thrum of the forest. 

Some of his fire emerged in the red lines his nails left down Harry’s back and across his shoulders. Draco knew they must have stung, but they would fade away just as he had. Just as Harry—the Chosen One, the Savior, the skinny boy in broken glasses with mismatched clothes and messy hair—never could.

He kissed the thin scratches he could reach, and Harry shuddered.

Draco didn’t last long. But then, he’d been thinking about Harry for years—rescue fantasies, sexual fantasies, they all began to blend at some point. It was a wonder that Harry himself wasn’t a phantasm, a wonder that he’d actually managed to reach him.

Draco always fell first in everything, descending while Harry ascended. Of course he’d reach white oblivion before him—he’d only finished falling and hit the bottom, starbursts exploding on the back of his eyelids. 

Harry took longer. Draco didn’t often embrace the sensation of over-stimulation, but that mattered little to him now. He wanted to give Harry everything in a way that was powerful and terrifying. He thought he was too debauched for shame and guilt, but the two rose before him, insurmountable, looming mountains with a shadow in the shape of his father’s silhouette. 

But Harry was the sun, his light to the darkness, and Draco still felt frozen. He could face down his ghosts for a chance to be warm again.

Harry tumbled over that cliff after him, lost to the world, encompassed in pleasure. They remained intertwined as their breathing began to slow.

His lips a kiss on the other man’s skin, his voice lost in a breath, his words a secret for the wind in the leaves...he admitted it.

He did not have to tell his secret to the forest, because the forest knew.

 _I love you_.

 

_*_

 

This time, it was Harry who threaded their fingers together. “I miss you.”

Draco squeezed his hand, resting his head on his shoulder. “I miss you too.”

Their bodies were pressed against one another, skin tacky with sweat and kisses. Harry cleaned them with a wandless wave of his hand and Draco curled more comfortably into him, humming contentedly. They were silent for a long while after that.

Harry could feel the sun on his face. The soft sounds of the forest melted and mixed in with mist that was barely there at the edges of the clearing, catching the sunlight and making everything glitter and shine. Breathing deeply, Harry felt a profound sense of well-being settle in his bones.

The silence remained unbroken save for their breathing, until Draco finally asked, “What’s it like, Harry?”

“What’s what like?”

“Your life away from here.”

Harry shrugged. “It’s alright. I’m an Auror, which I thought would be a bit more action, but recently I’ve been put on desk duty with Ron—and the cases we do have are…too much action, really. I hang out with Hermione and Ron sometimes, but ever since they got married I’ve felt a little like I’m intruding, I don’t know. They’re my best friends, but it’s just…different.”

“Can you tell me…” Draco drifted off.

“Tell you what?”

“Just, a day? What you do, from start to finish? What it’s like?” There was a waver in his voice as he spoke.

Harry noticed. “Sure. Then once you’re out of here, you can tell me about your own.”

He started talking. About waking up, going on his runs, fixing breakfast. Going to the Ministry, the kind of people he worked with, going to cafes with Luna, or Neville, or Hermione. His favorite coffee. His favorite pastry. The book he was reading, the authors he liked, any particularly funny cases he’d recently looked at. Harry thought about mentioning a certain sly little fox, but he dismissed the idea—if his hunch was correct, there was nothing to tell to Draco that he didn’t already knew.

It was simple but pleasant chatter, and Harry had a lighthearted ease about him that Draco couldn’t remember sensing ever beforehand. Harry’s hand stroked his arm in light circles, a sweetly familiar gesture. The painful wish for this to be more real than a dream clamped onto his heart like a vice and tightened.  

Harry faltered when Draco began to shiver. He had a tear in the corner of his eye that he seemed to be doing his very best to retract. “Are—hey, Draco.” His voice was soft, his eyes concerned. “What did I say?”

“Oh, it was everything you said,” he replied, wiping the last of the moisture away. “But nothing you meant. I just mss it in a way it doesn’t miss me—I’d like to hear more. Please?” he asked, holding Harry’s forearm and resting a hand on his chest.

So Harry hesitantly continued. He felt as though he shouldn’t, because he knew it was making Draco upset, but he knew he would be more so if he didn’t. Harry supposed it was better to glimpse outside the window of a prison cell—even if that glimpse made him sad for everything he did not have—than to not have a window at all.  

Harry threaded his fingers through his soft hair and talked until Draco fell asleep. He watched him, serene as he’d never seen him with his face relaxed as it never was in wakefulness, and knew he was in too deep.

Pressing a kiss to his forehead, he whispered fiercely, “I’ll find you.”

Rouqine had nothing to worry about.


	9. Chapter 9

In places like this, the forest reeked of decay and magic sickness.

These uninhabitable spaces were tainted with an overflow of enchantment, rotting like overripe fruit, so sweet it was revolting. The world and the creatures who belonged within it rebelled against their existence, and so these spaces were relegated to legends and left to atrophy alone. Only the fae tended to them, because they were largely the ones who created these blights in the forest, their mischief and meddling disrupting the natural balance of things. And even then it was rare to see even a fae—they preferred to let their frankenstinien creations live out their lifespans without interference. 

These were the spaces Draco spent his time, searching for someone who might once have been him. The festering forest made his head spin after too long breathing in magic like noxious gasses. After the first day hunting, he learned his lesson. He had been sick for ages afterwards, lying prone in his sanctuary as Rouqine came and went. Sometimes he was himself, sometimes not—he shifted forms as the ground shifted beneath him, the sensation of seasickness nothing but an illusion made real in his mind. He could not control what his body did and deluded as he was, did not mind much the world shifted and glided into the echoey black-and-white of a bat’s view, or the sharpened monochrome of a fox’s, or the strange peripheral distortion through a buck’s eyes. The only time he moved was when the world blackened in a slow blink. He didn’t recall breathing—perhaps the air simply drifted in and out of his lungs according to its own whim.  The magic made him stuck within himself and without himself at once.

Rouqine hadn’t said much to him as he slowly crept back into awareness, though she mentioned later on when he was feeling better that lurking in areas afflicted with great magic sickness caused her concern.

“I have to find him,” Draco replied to her. He didn’t tell her to stop worrying—he wasn’t that daft. Had he been less determined, he would have been worried himself.

“Must you though?” she asked. “He lives a happy life.”

“He doesn’t know he lives one.”

“Precisely.”

Draco sighed. Rouqine was lovely, and without her company he surely would have been driven insane by now, or at the very least lost his humanity. He may have become wholly one with the fae, with no desire to reside with human beings, who obviously existed only for the fae’s manipulation and entertainment. He may never have met with Harry again. Even if it was just the meager dreams he was afforded, he hoarded his memories of the two of them like a dragon did treasure. But she could be so positively bleak sometimes.  “I took that from him,” he tried to explain. “If not for me, he would be in my stead.”

“Ripping him out of his loop will not guarantee a good life, darling. He’s safe there.”

Draco was deeply conflicted. He wanted to say there was more to life than living in safety, but if he truly believed that, he might not be in the trouble he was in now. And he didn’t know how to explain to her how much this meant to him—after all, he couldn’t remember meeting the child. He’d only been an infant himself. If no one had told him otherwise, he’d never know the boy existed.

But his mother had told him. He’d seen the photographs. He’d heard the story. She could have had a child, and then, suddenly, she never could. She never dared again.

He’d stripped him of his opportunity, even though it hadn’t really been him to decide it. He didn’t know how to voice this strange guilt that fed on itself like a snake eating its tail in the pit of his stomach. He only knew that it grew every time he thought about it, and he knew that time would only exacerbate it.

Was this only selfish? Would the baby truly be living a better life stuck in the loop? Was anyone content to live like that? The thought perturbed Draco. He wanted to do what was right for the child—of course he did, he owed him his life—but how was he supposed to know what was right if his own emotions got in the way of it?

He didn’t have a plan. He didn’t know enough to make one. But he needed to find him.

After that, he would think of something.

For now, he needed to return to the festering spaces.

 

_*_

 

Even though Draco wouldn’t admit it, Harry knew he was unwell. He looked like he had those sparse weeks before he’d left, too thin and too pale. With his arms around him, even through the cloth of his shirt, Harry could feel the indents of his ribs. Dark purple crescents underscored his tired eyes. His fingers shook as they trailed down Harry’s arm. And the air around him fizzled and popped, smelling oversweet. It was not Draco’s scent, the heady cinnamon and autumn leaves—it was something even less predictable. The crackle of the aura that encompassed him did not seem his own, tainted, somehow, by something other than him.

When Draco was happy, sometimes, his words would bubble forth like a spring, gentle ribbing, riddles and rhymes and all sorts of things Harry couldn’t make sense of. When he worried, he became withdrawn, as he was now. A troubled Draco always made Harry nervous. It reminded him too much of leaving.  

“What’s wrong?” Harry coaxed one night as they lay together. It had been after many kept in disquieting silence. Harry had tried bringing up the night they had sex, thinking because of the sequence of events that this may have been what disconcerted Draco, but he was met with immediate reassurances and an annoyed little _tsk_. “Ridiculous, Potter,” he’d muttered, taking his hand and pressing it close. “Don’t think that.”

Though knowing Draco didn’t regret their time together was heartening, it was not helpful. Harry could not figure out how to reassure Draco if he did not know what was bothering him. It may have been the approaching deadline, but Harry could not understand why the stress of such  thing would wreak such rapid and drastic havoc on not only Draco’s body but on his magical aura as well.

Draco did not respond to Harry’s question immediately. His head was on Harry’s chest and his eyes stared out to nothing, his thumb drawing circles on Harry’s shirt. He wasn’t in the mood to do much of anything, neither talking nor anything else. Harry had even tried trailing a hand down his spine, the most sensitive spot on his body even when he wasn’t aroused, but Draco just grunted in a vaguely irked tone and placed Harry’s arm around his shoulders instead.  

“It’s nothing,” he sighed eventually, rubbing at the small bruises beneath his eyes wearily.

“It’ll be alright,” Harry said, grasping at what was bothering him like straws. His grip tightened around him. “I’m coming to help.”

Draco smiled wanly and gave him a grateful peck. “I know.”

“But you’re still worried.”

“Yes.” It was no use hiding what Harry so clearly saw anyway.

“About what?”

Draco bit his lip. “I’d rather not talk about it,” he said. “Talking about things make them real. I need to keep some distance, for now. Alright?”

“Alright,” he replied slowly. “If it’s not dangerous.”

 _It looks dangerous_ , Harry thought unhappily.  _But he won't tell me even if it is._

He was right about that.

“Not at all,” Draco lied, trying to make it sound easy. He was normally a natural at it, which may or may not have been a thing to brag about, but Harry made everything difficult. He figured diversion was the way to go. “No, just…trying. I don’t like what I have to do here.”  His voice may have broken slightly as he said it. It may have been on purpose.

 Harry was really too predictable. “No, of course not, I’m sorry,” he apologized immediately, not wanting to fight about it. Draco always got defensive and furious when they talked about the things the Queen made him do, riddling in rapidly escalating volume until either Harry calmed him down again or Draco ended the dream. Harry knew it was because the things he did made him question his self-worth, made him wonder why he didn't try harder to resist. Harry, for one, was glad Draco didn't rebel outright, even if doing so presented him with this nearly debilitating moral dilemma - much as he valued bravery, he also very much wanted this man he had dreamt about so often to be alive when he finally wrapped him in his arms.

Harry knew he couldn’t push him to talk about those sorts of things. Just like Harry couldn’t talk about the war or the people he’d lost, though Hermione contested his point whenever he brought it up. Some things were just meant to be held close and cradled like a wound. Silence maybe made it fester, but it also made it easier to conceal. And some wounds went so deep, Harry thought he could fill volumes upon heavy, dusty volumes with his chicken scratch and it would never be enough to make him whole again. And so he lived with the blackened parts of his heart, because time had cauterized the wound and left a scar that he didn’t want to pick it apart again.

The problem was, there was no time for Draco. Nothing was in the past for him—everything was the present. And if Harry still couldn’t talk about these things, he couldn’t blame Draco for reacting with aggression. Harry was no pushover, but he was empathetic, and so he tried to console Draco whenever he felt him getting worked up. After all, he himself had been blacklisted from Dreamless Sleep for the next ten years. He knew a thing or two about torment.

He just wished knowing all that would keep him from worrying.

But instead, he ran his thumb gently across the bruises under Draco’s eyes, and bit his tongue.

For now there was nothing to do but believe him. Seven years was almost here.

The anniversary of the Battle of Hogwarts was rapidly approaching.

 

_*_

 

The next day, when he came home from work, Harry found that much of his house had been ransacked. It looked as though a small tornado had torn through his bedroom, living room, and kitchen. Shattered cups were broken on the ground. Cupboards and drawers were laid open. Place mats were thrown on the floor and dishes were upended. Sudsy water from the bowls he’d left to soak dripped across the floor.

“Ziti!” he shouted once he got control over his hanging jaw. “Ziti!”

 “It wassssssn’t me!” came the snake’s nasally voice from somewhere within the house. “It was the cat!”

“What _cat_?” Harry demanded, waving his wand at the mess in the kitchen so he could walk without grinding bits of glass into his shoes. “We don’t have a cat!”

“She climbed in through your window!” Ziti explained. “Honessstly, if you don’t want visitors, you should leave it closed.”

“My place is warded and my window is on the second floor,” Harry muttered, shooting a charm at the place mats which sent them zipping to the laundry. “I didn’t think it would be an issue. Is she still in here?”

“No, she left.” Ziti twisted himself anxiously into a coil, trying to make himself smaller as he usually did when met with Harry’s disapproval.

Harry scowled. “Can she talk like our fox friend? Did you speak to her?”

“Yes,” Ziti said. “A bit. She was unpleasant. Rather cryptic.”

“What did she say?”

“She was looking for something.”

“Did she take anything?”

Ziti wiggled a bit in his subpar approximation of a shrug. “I don’t know. After about an hour I lossssst interest and took a nap.”

Harry rolled his eyes. “You’re the worst guard snake. I should have let them make you into shoes.” He made a note to ask Draco about it next time they met. Surely he wasn’t behind this? He would have just asked Harry for whatever he needed, rather than staging a B&E.

Ziti gasped, offended. “You don’t mean that!”

Harry grunted, swishing his wand around the room. If that cat broke his favorite mug, he grumbled he would make the shoes himself.

 


	10. Chapter 10

Two days before Draco was set to leave, he found what he was looking for on the outside of a loop.

Being ill was routine for him at this point. He could predict whether or not he would violently expel the contents of his stomach by the amount of time he spent in the sickly, festering areas. The sweet smell of his haunts clung to him, like the scent of browned and blackened fruit. Trying to use magic to make it go away just made it worse.

He wasn’t well. He knew he should stop. But seven years was approaching. He wouldn’t get another chance. And of course, he’d always had an obsessive personality.

His ghosts wouldn’t stop haunting him.

He found him in the magic sickness, the boy who was supposed to be him. Stuck in the loop. Forever playing the same part.

He watched from outside as his mother played with her boy, joyous laughter bubbling out of his mouth, the sound composed of pure distilled happiness that only infants seemed capable of. The original Draco. He looked cold and she remembered she’d left his little blanket by the house, so she turned away. He watched the looming figure appear from the trees, the baby looking wide-eyed into the shadowed face of the fae who was to take him, locked in skeletal fingers, the torso long and too thin, far too thin.  He heard his mother shriek. He saw the cloud of dust and magic as time rearranged itself.

“Not my baby!”

The loop reset itself. He saw his mother play with her boy, the original Draco.

How young she looked, then. How carefree. She didn’t know she was seconds away from disaster.

For her sake, he had to save him.

She deserved better than the half-life he could offer her.

Hopefully, baby Draco could grow and figure out how to do something that he himself had never learned: how to thrive without hurting others. He felt like everyone he spent time with he hurt in some way or another.

He’d left his mother behind for a war and decades after. He’d ignored his father and let him slip away, lost to the madness, the murder, the fanaticism. He was tying Harry to an unknown future, one that would be frightening certainly, and frustrating most definitely. And by leaving here he was damning poor Rouqine to suffer for an eternity alone, even though she was too stoic to say anything about it. If he was selfless, he wouldn’t have even gotten Harry involved. He would have been satisfied with his fate, horrible as it was. He would have borne his yoke as tormentor, because tormenting seemed the only thing he was halfway decent at.

But then he looked into his victims eyes, into the dazed and dopily content gaze of those who didn’t realize they were already under his spell. He thought they might have had mothers, or fathers, or their very own Harry. And unlike him, loving their mothers and fathers and Harrys probably hadn’t torn chucks out of their hearts like it did him, the broken thing that he was. Affection could never be an easy thing for him like it was for others.

He couldn’t love anyone easily. But it hurt him to hurt them just as much. At one the tormentor and the tormented.

And so it all looped back.

Draco watched his mother play with the baby while laughter bubbled from his mouth.

 _I’ll save you_ , he promised.

He had to go back to the Queen. He had to fulfill his bargain.

He knew he had to go, but he could wait just a little while longer. After all, he had all the time in the world where there was none.

The baby laughed.

 

_*_

 

“Draco. Are you listening to me?”

“Hmm? Yes, sorry. Miles away.”

Rouqine sighed, dragging a hand through her curls and making them bounce in the dim torchlight, throwing shadows like the flickering flame. “You need to listen to me. I know how the night goes, Draco. If you’re not prepared, you’ll get lost.”

“I’m sorry, Rouqine.” He knew she was right. And he knew it was wrong that she seemed more invested than he was. But it was difficult for him, this. Because it was running away, and he’d told himself a long time ago that he wouldn’t run from things that scared him. But staying here would also be a sort of running away, a different one. Away from the possibility of a real life, with real hopes and real dreams.

To have the possibility of a happy life—wasn’t that terrifying? To take his own destiny in his hands and try to determine what would ruin him and what wouldn’t, striving to obtain something he’d only heard about but never experienced—what scarier thing was there?

Better not to go. Better to cloister himself in the forest and resign himself to what he had than risk everything just to muck it all up again in a year, ten years, fifty. He didn’t want to look back on his life and see all his misery when death dragged him into its dark depths, but at least this way, he could hold himself close in the knowledge that his sadness had been someone else’s fault. But how would he protect himself if he looked through his life after however long it was and realized that every bad situation, every unholy outcome had been spawned from his own design?

Draco had never been a leader, and this proved it. He did not even know how to lead himself.

Maybe it would be better to stay where someone could tell him what to do. Then he wouldn’t have to worry about doing the right or wrong thing—he would only have to do the only option given to him, to simply obey. There would be no grey area.

What a wonderful, horrible fate, freedom would be.

“Did you hear anything of what I said?”

“To get out of the fort, go not in human form to the horses. That way She’s less likely to notice.”

“Yes. And you are less likely to be dragged down by the magic, back into the fray. And where are the stables?”

“There are none, I thought?”

“Right,” she said. “The type of horse you’ll need is one made of moonlight, not darkness. Wherever the light hits the ground between the shadows—they’re not truly horses, though they at least are more real than Thestrals. They have skin and bone. But only live with the moon, and are always called back into the forest. Look for where the moon is strong.”

Draco nodded. “I will.”

She nodded. “As you leave,” she said very seriously, leaning in her seat, “do not think of anything but your freedom, what you’ll have on the outside. Because if you look back, if you hesitate, if you even _think_ about your life here, it will grab you and rip you back into this hell. The magic doesn’t like to let go, love. Neither does she. I will help you when I can, but you must do this.”

It was as if she knew the turmoil in his mind. He cocked his head, narrowing his eyes. Maybe he was underestimating her. Maybe he was being unfair. After all, she had gone through this once before. Though in the end, it hadn’t mattered for her.

“I know,” Draco replied. Of course Rouqine knew. “I know.”

She hummed again and held his hand in hers for a moment before getting up. “You’ll live, darling,” she said. “You’ll live, because I can’t. Do this for me, and I’ll be happy.”

“Can you not come with me?” he asked, and too much of his worry, too much of his anxious back-and-forth stained his voice. She looked at him with sympathetic, if tired, eyes.

“I don’t belong with him,” she said. “He might be for you, but he will never be enough for me to keep me tethered. Don’t worry about me, sweetheart. I’ll find my way out of the woods one day, in eternity. For now, I’ll help you fight your own way out.”

“I can’t ask you to do that,” Draco protested. “The Qu—she—”

“Let me deal with her in the after,” she said. “Do not trouble yourself in my fight.”

“But you’re troubling yourself in mine!”

She smiled enigmatically. “They may be one in the same.”

“But they aren’t,” Draco argued, perplexed. Hadn’t they just gone over this?

“Time shall tell.” With this phrase, even more frustrating than usual because they lived in a void of time, she left, throwing an upwards twitch of her lips over her shoulder as a parting gift. Despite her words, guilt still mixed with his confusion and frustration.

He always felt damned, even more so now that freedom was so close.

Was the fort the problem? Or was it himself?

Throughout the whole conversation, Draco had been distracted but composed. However, when Draco was sick that night, he knew it was from more than just the magic.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey folks!
> 
> So I have basically everything written now save for a few edits here and there, so I'll be posting fairly frequently after this. 
> 
> If you have any speculation about what might happen, please tell me! I love to hear other people's takes on this story, and a lot of the comments I received on "In the Deep, Dark Woods" greatly influenced how I wrote this second part.
> 
> Much love and happy reading!


	11. Chapter 11

 

The night was here.

The forest felt raw and fragile, like a tree stripped of its bark or a chrysalis slowly cracking. Like a snake writhing to rid itself of its old skin, the transformation began.

Draco knew what the Queen wanted. She wanted a party. She wanted fresh blood to seep into the dance floor as the roots reworked themselves beneath their stomping feet and they were born anew to the thrum of music and magic. Life and death meant nothing to the fae, but blood meant everything.

Well, Draco rounded up everyone he could get. The more people there, the less she would focus on him.

So he flitted from lost person to lost person, promising them wealth, glory, immortality. He became a lovely damsel, crying out in distress, or a strapping young man asking for help. A child, whimpering for his mother. That form felt far more real than the others, for it was exactly what he felt. What he would have given to go back to when his mother struck a towering, impossible figure, powerful as a goddess while his pint-sized person reached halfway to her hip, wrapping his little fingers around her leg and knowing with certainty that she would protect him. He had never been brave, but no one could protect him here—he would have to defend himself. At the sacrifice of many others.

They didn’t know it, but they were martyrs for him.

 _Torturer or tortured._ He supposed he was both.

He was running out of time.

 

_*_

 

When the screaming began, Draco departed.

He melted into the shadows and swerved through the trees, stepping round the underbrush and weaving around roots. From the fort, he could hear the dancing, the music, the murder. His stomach felt inside-out, his nerves jumping, his heart pounding in his throat. All his organs were mixed up and put out of place.

He knew some of this was anxiety. He also knew some of this was the renewal process, the fever and the dizziness, the manic highs and the spiraling lows. He had to force his head clear by stuffing the mint leaves he stashed in his pocket into his mouth. 

He wanted to stay in the fort. He wanted to sing, to laugh, to dance, to die. But he couldn’t stay.

He felt, rather than heard, the person behind him. There was a muggy heat that pricked the back of his neck and made him feel feverish. The forest was humid, alive and writhing with rebirth, and it gave off heat in dizzying waves. When he whirled around, halfway convinced what he was feeling was just a delusion, he was surprised to find that determined hazel eyes and curly red hair greeted him.

“I’m going to help you,” Rouqine said.

Draco began to panic. She didn’t know about the loops—he hadn’t told her. It was too late now. But he couldn’t seem to think straight, not with that strange disorienting heat emanating from her. A bead of sweat trailed down the side of his face. “No, you can’t. I have to do this alone.”

She scowled at him. “I do know what you’re playing at, you realize,” she said. “You’ve been ill for ages. Fae don’t _get_ ill in the forest, not unless they’re doing something they shouldn’t be. Let’s go, before she realizes we’re missing.” Rouqine pushed past him.

Draco hadn't moved, stunned by the turn of events. His companion looked over her shoulder, curls bouncing in the moonlight. “Let’s find your brother,” she said. 

Draco saw the shape of something the waistband of her pants, covered swiftly by her shirt as she walked on. 

“What do you have?” Draco asked, wiping sweat off his brow. “What’s in your belt?”

“Our insurance,” Rouqine said, and left it at that. Draco didn’t press her.

He didn’t want her to elaborate.

 

_*_

 

His stomach continued to drop as they approached the sickened places. The fetid space was nerve-wracking in the darkness of the night, nefarious and unpredictable—one wrong move, and Draco didn’t want to know what would happen. Perhaps he would be sucked into voided time like a black hole, spinning endlessly. Perhaps not. The midnight moon heightened the wrongness of these spaces, pulling and pushing at him like seasickness, making him nauseous. Out of the two of them, he was affected the worst, though Rouqine turned an odd shade of green as they walked on. The dying magic clawed at his fae core, grasping like a drowning creature for a rope, serrating his insides. 

Everything was heightened during the rebirth night.

He moved with certainty through the darkness. He knew where he was going. Though the future terrified him, for now, he would have to immerse himself in the forever past. He could not think about it. His actions propelled him forward, his legs moving with a determination he didn’t dare question. If he thought, he would not do. And what needed doing was his alone.

Draco hovered in front of the loop he knew was his. Images flashed before his eyes. His mother. The blanket. The dark fae, skeletal and wreathed in shadow. The baby.

He took one, two, three steadying breaths.

Rouqine watched apprehensively a ways away. Despite living with them, she was no fae—she did not understand how such diseased magic worked.

She had a feeling in her gut. She had a hunch she didn’t want to voice. Living with the fae for so long, she was predisposed to premonitions. She had learned to trust her instincts. And yet, she didn’t move.

She watched as Draco sank into the loop, and touched the handle tucked into her belt. The feel of it, warm from her body heat, comforted her through her worry.

 _I need to do this right_ , she thought.

_This time will be different._

 

_*_

 

Draco threw himself into the loop as Narcissa turned her back, pulling the shadows tightly around himself to shield him from the rotting magic and hide him from the other fae. Head spinning and unable to breathe, he picked up the boy who would never otherwise grow to be a man. They looked at each other in wonder, large grey eyes blinking up at him from a chubby, angelic face.

“I’m here to save you,” he whispered fiercely, pressing the baby to gently his chest and swaddling him in the shadows and his own protective magic, hoping the unpredictability of fae enchantment wouldn’t hurt him. He twisted to leave, debris from the disrupted loop kicking up dust and smoke as he tripped back through it, hurrying the baby away. He knew the loop was about to fall apart—now that he had disrupted it, it would be no more. He had limited time. He had to return if he had any chance of getting out of the forest alive.

As the passage through the loop and back to his own non-time irreversibly began, he heard Narcissa scream:

_“Not my baby!”_

He turned to see her sprinting to him, her eyes wide in panic and her face white as a ghost, her hands stretched before her in desperation.

Then, the world went black.

And Draco realized…there was no other fae.

 

The Queen’s dark laugh echoed through the trees.


	12. Chapter 12

 

Draco emerged from the loop with the baby in tow. Rouqine thought he'd been successful until he sank to the ground on unsteady knees, pressing the bundle in his arms close to his chest protectively and listing dangerously to the side, as though balancing on both legs had suddenly become too much for him.

She hurried over to him, troubled by the blankness she saw in his face. He stared out at nothing, his limbs stiff and his body shaking. When Draco became outwardly tranquil, Rouqine had learned bad things tended to happen, much like the apprehensive motionlessness which built before a storm.

Beside him, the loop writhed and withered, blackening like a leaf in a fire.

The baby began to sniffle.

“We must leave,” she said, rushing to his side. The bulge tucked into her belt pressed against her thigh awkwardly, making it difficult to kneel. But Draco, unperturbed by the urgency of the night or the insistence of Rouqine’s hand on his shoulder, simply shook his head. He looked frighteningly lost.

“I never wondered why it was open,” Draco whispered numbly, and Rouqine got the feeling he wasn’t addressing her. From how he acted, it didn’t seem to matter to him whether or not she was there. “I never asked why I knew I could get in.”

“We have to—”

“I didn’t know it was waiting for me,” he said, looking at her for the first time since returning, his gaze anguished and unfocused as he met her befuddled one. “It was _waiting for me_.”

“The loop?” she asked, still baffled. As if sensing the tension in the air, the baby began to cry in earnest, his little face scrunched up and splotchy red with the effort.

“ _I’m_ the fae,” Draco fruitlessly tried to explain, his logic thwarted by his panic, his voice rising, his breathing becoming increasingly heavy and interspersed with little high-pitched, strangled wheezes around the edges, as if something had begun constricting his airway. “I—”

“Look.” Her tone was sharp and she cut him off before he could continue. She knew his warning signs, not that it took a genius to understand that Draco was on the path to self-implosion. One look at his bloodless face and over-bright eyes could tell anyone that. “We need to focus. If you need to break down, do so after you’re out of the woods. Got it?”

Draco panted for a few moments longer, visibly struggling to get himself under control. He was shaking so much he thought that if he relaxed his grip on the baby, who was screaming his discomfort, he would drop him. Slowly, the world stopped spinning, but the child kept wailing. And the broken part of Draco cried with him.

 _I need to go back,_ he sobbed, gritting his teeth and not allowing the words to pass from his lips. _I need to fix this, I need to go back, oh god, Harry, I need help, I need **help, I need help!**_

But Harry wasn’t there, and the only one who could save him was himself.  Rouqine was right. The night was peaking, and the Queen would notice soon that something was amiss.

Finally, after another round of shaking deep breaths and a couple hard tugs on his hair to ground himself, he nodded. He did what he’d done. The loop was gone. He couldn’t go back—he had to forge on. And he couldn’t stay here. The baby’s only chance to live a real life was to get out of this forest. And that meant Draco had to take him.

Standing back up again, he shushed the sobbing child gently, swathing him in more protection spells and then putting him gently to sleep. He wished he could join him and simply let someone else handle this. Instead, Draco had layered on every single shield and protection he knew, and then dumped some extra magic on top just in case. He was a fledgling fae in the grand scheme of them, but he was powerful. He hoped that would be enough to protect them.

“Let’s go.”

 

_*_

 

They had no issue finding a horse. Unlike Rouqine, Draco was fae-born, not human—he was one with the forest in a manner that she had never felt as deeply, despite living within it for much longer. It told him things and whispered its secrets to him as he did to it in a way she could never understand.

The forest never picked sides with its children—it helped and hindered them as one. Through twists and turns escaping the magic sickness, the ragtag bunch of human, fae and infant managed to evade the raucous din of rebirth and resisted the pull of blossoming newness within the faerie forts. The darkness tugged at the hems of their cloaks and the soles of their shoes, trying to entice them with promises of tranquility and transformation. Why leave when transcendence was but a hesitation away?

But much as the forest was discordant with Draco, it was also fickle, much like its inhabitants. Which is why it presented two creatures to him, one after another.

The first was a horse, gleaming milky white in the moonlight, its mane shining atop its strong neck, its dark hooves pawing at the earth. Draco hurried to it as fast as he dared, trying not to spook it. It responded to his outstretched hand with an eager nuzzle, running its forehead across Draco’s palm. It was part of the forest, just as Draco was. He could feel its contentment, its wondrousness, and it’s strange and perceptive sort of intelligence. When he looked into one large, dark eye, he was met with intense scrutiny from the clever creature. He gently pressed the barriers of its mind, much as he had done with Harry when sharing his experiences. Simply finding the horse was not enough. He needed to guide him, as well.

“You must go with him,” Rouqine urged, kneeling next to him. “Quickly. I’ll help you up.”

 _Perhaps we can get out of this without a fight_ , she thought as her knee hit the ground. And of course, because the fae have a funny sense of humor, this was exactly when the second creature emerged.

A contrast to the horse in the silver moonlight—this creature was one with the black tar of shadow. Her eyes bore into Draco like bullets. Her lips were red like blood, her teeth sharp as daggers.

Her smile was a deadly thing.

They had been found.

Finally, the Queen arrived.

 


	13. Chapter 13

 

Harry had to _leave_.

He knew this would happen. He got caught in this web of hand-shaking and political hemming and hawing. He didn’t want to be here, but the Minister of Magic had him attached firmly to his hip, steering him around to all the important people he needed to talk to. Most complimented him on his speech, or his performance in the Auror corps, fawning over his accomplishments and waxing poetic about his life struggles. It made a vein throb in his temple, having to share breath with people who didn’t respect his personal space, leaning in as though they were great friends and whispering conspiratorially about something they’d read about him in the Prophet a month ago. The director of the Department of Magical Creatures very earnestly offered up his daughter for Harry if he was lonely, recounting a photo he’d seen of Harry alone at a bar, looking for where Ron had gone. Madam Malkin’s granddaughter flirted with him from above an opaque cup full of something stronger than what they served at ministry functions. Neville, hand in hand with Hannah Abott—who was animatedly chatting with one of her coworkers at the Ministry—met Harry’s desperate eye and cringed at him from across the room, shrugging helplessly.

 _All I did was cast a bloody Expelliarmus,_ he thought mutinously at the girl in front of him, which obviously did nothing. _Neville killed the bloody evil snake. Go talk to him._

Of course, that never worked. Though Neville did get much more attention now than he ever had as a child—adulthood had been good for him. Even Harry admitted it, though the eleven-year-old he used to know showed through in his too-large, goofy grin whenever he began talking about his plants as though they had minds of their own.

Luna, bless her heart, always knew when to come in. Her strangeness had evolved as she grew—Harry wondered if she was a Seer herself, with more of a handle on her ability than Trelawney ever had. She certainly did show up right when she was needed.

“Minister, I’m going to have to steal Harry from you for a minute,” she smiled, grasping Harry’s elbow. She exchanged a few pleasantries with Kingsley before leading Harry away.

She walked him to the door and looked at him, her eyes sparking with dreamy amusement. “I believe you might have somewhere else to be,” she said. “You have that look about you. Mickelwidgets are nesting in your hair.”

Harry swiped a hand through his cowlicks, feeling only his uncooperative locks and thankfully no tiny magical creatures. “I’ll keep that in mind,” he said, bending down and kissing Luna on the cheek. “You’re a lifesaver,” he told her.

She waved him away with a wispy smile. “Go do what you have to,” she replied. “I’m sure it will be exciting.”

“We’ll see about that,” Harry muttered, taking off his tie and making a beeline for the exit. No one could stop him now, not with his heart thudding in his throat and the feel of Draco’s weight in his arms a fresh memory.

They were so _close,_ Harry could almost feel Draco’s skin on his.

Years to months to weeks to days to hours to minutes to seconds.

All the time spent apart was too much.

 

_*_

           

The Queen grinned, her eyes disconcertingly void of emotion. “You do have a talent for creating chaos,” she said, addressing Draco. “You make a fine fae. Won’t you stay, little lost boy?”

Draco clutched the horse’s mane with his free hand, as though the creature between them could act as a buffer. He tried not to let his anxiety stream towards his new friend, knowing that such animals were sensitive and flighty—but it whinnied in distress nonetheless, tossing its head.

“We made a bargain,” she reminded him, approaching slowly, as though he himself were a horse, and as easily spooked. Perhaps he was more so, if the rapid beating of his heart was an indication. For the second time in a startlingly short amount of time, he felt a panic attack creep up on him, sinking its poison claws into his chest. Every molecule in his body was screaming at him to run. “You wouldn’t want anything to happen to your dear mother, would you?”

“Don’t,” Draco managed through a clenched jaw. He grit his teeth to keep them from rattling. Her threat was real, he knew. But her voice contained an airy quality that he had never heard from her before. Her steps, though graceful, bent and wavered in a dance that he had never seen her perform. Her dark hair glinted in the moonlight. And he realized that however badly he was affected by the seven years renewal of his magic, this head-spinning heat sickness, he knew she was worse.

“You’ve done so _well_ ,” she purred, idling ever closer, as though her approaching steps were nothing more than mere coincidence. Her eyes were wide, and had a mad glint in them that was terrifyingly reminiscent to his Aunt Bella’s during those days at the buildup of the war, just before he’d fled. “Surely that delirious little human girl hasn’t been filling your head with lies.”

“No.” Even to his own ears, his voice sounded hoarse and feeble. His mind spun. There was too much pressure in his temples—he felt the strange premonition of a nose bleed coming on. _Hoarse, horse, hearse, haste, Harry, help me…_

He needed to leave. He couldn’t let her continue talking. But his well of riddles and rhymes had run dry. He had been running a marathon, and now, at the finish line, he found he didn’t have the strength to struggle past it. He could not fight her, not without risking the baby. The baby. _The baby_.

The one he’d taken from his mother. The real Draco. The one who should have existed instead of him.

And it was all, well and truly, his own fault.

The weight of it struck him like a blow, like a punch to the gut, like a car wreck.

He was well and truly fae. He caused chaos wherever he went. He only destroyed the lives of those he loved.

Maybe he would be better here after all. Trapped in the forest, spread thin through time, surely he wouldn’t be able to hurt his loved ones so. If he really loved them, wouldn’t he sacrifice himself for them? Isn’t that what Harry had done? Wasn’t that _honorable_? Or, if he wasn’t a creature deserving of honor, wasn’t it _right_?

Wasn’t he trying to be better?

 _It’s what you deserve_ , an insidious voice hissed in his head. He had said it enough to himself, he half believed it.

But Draco knew he was not brave, and he knew he was not selfless. He wasn’t Harry, whom he loved for all the things he could never be. He couldn’t give himself up to suffering so others could have a chance—when he had made his bargain, he had weighted the benefits. He had chosen to sell his life away, because doing so was better than living in a house tormented by a megalomaniac madman, better than having to kill an unkillable enemy, better than having to watch his mother die. Better because a part of him had and always would hunger for the forest, would crave to be a part of this primal world with this primordial magic.

But it wasn’t enough. And now he knew it.

The Queen should have sensed the iron, as Draco should have. But delirious on life and death and that precarious state in between, she was too absorbed in the fever to feel the stifling heat radiating from Rouqine’s person.

Slowly, so the Queen wouldn’t notice, she let her hand drift to her side and pulled out the fireplace poker from her belt. Made of iron, she was the only one who could hope to wield it in the depths of the forest. The end was sharpened to a wicked point from hours shaping it the day before.

 _Insurance_ , she’d said.

 _My last hope_ , she’d thought.

When the Queen came close, she lunged.

The forest didn’t care about life or death, but blood meant everything.

           

_*_

 

Next thing she knew, Rouqine was thrown back by a blast of air, propelled by the Queen’s fury at being attacked. The shadows sprang forth with their own life, growing and thrashing. Tree trunks thickened around them, their branches elongated like spindly fingers. The air around them crackled with electricity, enough to lift the hair from the Queen’s shoulders and send it swirling around her head in a black cloud.

Rouqine landed heavily in the underbrush, her thighs and back thrashed by whipcord-tough stalks and branches, her head _thudding_ unpleasantly against the ground. For a moment, her opponent doubled blurrily, and Rouqine wondered if she had performed some sort of mysterious fae replication before realizing her eyes had crossed temporarily with the force of the blow she’d taken. She felt blood seep from a cut on her temple to the leaves around her. The Queen’s own bullet-hole eyes darted smoking glares between her and Draco, empty as a shark's predatory gaze even as her face filled with rage.

She was furious and terrifying.

Draco stumbled to his friend even as he pressed the baby closer to his chest. He had no doubts—they would die tonight. If he had to, he would die protecting the baby. Maybe the Queen would spare him. Maybe she would even raise him, as Narcissa had raised him.

But then, from the scrape on the Queen’s ankle, a single drop of blood fell and spread onto the earth. Rouqine saw it from her position on the ground, iron still clasped in her white-knuckled fist, and then her majesty felt it.

The forest renewed itself. That night was one of rebirth. And magic was always set to change its course, to shift and twist and metamorphosis whenever it got the chance.

The magic accepted her sacrifices, the blood and bruises and iron and desperation. It accepted the one who had made it possible. The magic deep within the forest spun around them all, encompassing the four of them like a cocoon, ready for metamorphosis. And it twisted.

Rebirth. The night of the living and the dead and everything in between. The night of the fae’s greatest vulnerability.

Tension vibrated in the air like a guitar string pulled taut. Like a rope just waiting to snap, until it did.

With magic reborn, the world ended. 

 


	14. Chapter 14

 

The forest erupted.

White hot magic pulsed from the ground where blood had been spilled. The vines and branches reached up, snaring Draco in their grasp, thrashing back and forth in violent spasms. The wind whistled, stinging Draco’s unprotected skin and forcing tears to his eyes. The earth shook violently, as if it was being torn apart.

Screaming. There was screaming. It was the horse, its whinny of terror shriller than a banshee, its hooves stomping the ground far too close to Draco’s stumbling, shaking form as he reared and galloped away. Draco tripped and toppled to the side, rolling from pounding hooves as fast as he could without injuring the child, into the open limbs of the maddened forest. The skies split, pouring down freezing raindrops that hit like needles burrowing into his arms, cheeks, and forehead. He wouldn’t have been surprised if he started bleeding from the force of it.

As best he could despite the twisting tendrils, he threw himself forward into the fetal position, wrapped around the baby. His choices may have destroyed his tiny life, but he wouldn’t let them end it. He would protect him even if that meant leaving himself exposed.

Through the punishing storm, Draco squinted to try to find Rouqine. Rain stuck in his eyelashes and eyebrows, making everything hazy. She and the Queen were in the eye of the tornado, a white light surrounding them so bright it nearly blinded him. He had to look down, squeezing his eyes shut and watching white and yellow fizzling spots pass across his vision, completely disoriented.

He couldn’t see past the light. He couldn’t hear past the storm. And as the cold seeped into his bones, he began to lose feeling in his limbs, as well. He didn’t know how to reach them. He didn’t think he _could_ , not with the baby. And he screamed, his emotions refusing to be contained in the back of his mind, confessing that he didn’t want to go either.

After an eternity or a few seconds, Draco was so overwhelmed that he thought he was going deaf or blind as the light and sound began to recede. In his panicked state, that made much more sense than a simple fading of the catastrophe around him. But that was indeed what was happening. And somehow through it all the baby had slept, swaddled in layers upon layers of protection, shield, cushioning, and external silencing charms. 

Draco stayed hunched over him, shivering and pressing his nose gently into the little baby's head, breathing in the clean scent that only small ones had to steady himself until he felt a hand on his shoulder. He propelled the two of them backwards, landing on his arse in a rather pointy shrub and awkwardly hunched over to protect his little burden, scrambling to get up before he realized who it was.

“We have to go,” Rouqine said, her hazel eyes large and wild and her breathing rapid. She had a big scrape on her forehead, creeping from her temple to her hairline that was dripping down her face. She was herself, but there was a sense about her that was not, something in her aura that was more feral than it had been before. Something in his stomach shrank before her, like only it had done prior for one creature, ever.

“Wha…” Draco squinted around the clearing in panic and confusion. The place where the Queen’s blood had dripped in the dirt was all scorched earth for a circle about a foot in diameter with blackened grass around it. The plants seemed to have crept away from it, no shrubbery to be seen, even the trees themselves leaning outwards as if trying to distance themselves. But in the center of that scorched earth, a tiny sapling had just barely emerged.

“Where is the Queen?” Draco asked shakily.

Rouqine blinked and swallowed heavily. “I think…” she began shakily. “I think I’ve become her.”

 

_*_ 

 

Draco was sitting with the baby in his lap, staring uncomprehendingly at the scorched earth in front of him, the tiny sapling with leaves just unfurling in the center. The only part of him that moved was his right hand, gently flattening the tufts of fine white-blonde that stuck defiant of gravity from the little boy's head. Rouqine figured her friend was in shock, so she decided to make herself useful.

She could feel new power coursing through her veins. It made her vision sharper, her sense of smell more precise—ever her sense of touch felt different, the feel of the air on her skin now so much _more_ than it had ever been before. Even the shadows had a feel to them around her, soft and cool. And the iron that she had left in the underbrush burned, smoldering, red hot and deadly. Now that it was such a weapon, she couldn't fathom reaching out and touching it again. Which is exactly why she had to use it in the first place.

Ever since learning of Harry, she had had an idea in her head. It wouldn’t have been exactly the same as what happened that Halloween night, of course. But the right things were there.

Two enemies, facing off. The intent to kill. The person to protect and the blood on the ground. Hell, they even had a baby too, thrown in for good measure just in case. Except Rouqine never intended to leave him cursed as Harry had been, to no fault of his parents.

No, she wanted it all for herself.

The fae could never die, not unless they wanted to. They were not human. They were shape shifters, tricksters. The dryads of ancient times, the nymphs and cyclopses and will-o’-the-wisps—they could be whatever they wanted to be, if they had enough power.

Rouqine, with her offering of blood, some given, some taken, had asked the forest for that power.

Magic, like matter, could not come from nowhere. And the magic she felt within her, making her very cells vibrate with the intensity of it, was a magic she’d reviled for longer than she could remember.

In the last moments of their struggle, the Queen had done the last thing she could, overcome by the fickle nature of the forest and its transformative magic. She had transformed herself into the one thing that could not be made dishonored by being stripped of her title. She made herself one with the forest, completely.

It was a process that often happened with fae—when they were ready to depart, or when the forest was ready for them to, they would give themselves over to their home, protector and guardian. The trees thrummed with lives past. And that was how the fae stayed guarded still. Usually, the process was not as violent. But usually, the Queen was not so violent. And, as Rouqine said, _needs must._

Rouquine retrieved Draco’s spooked steed after wandering the forest for him, long enough that the new magic had become less jagged and irritated and she slowly became more able to function. She wondered, briefly, if this was how Draco felt before she discarded the notion. Draco was still young, even in human years—he was not the eons that the Queen had been, that she was still, which she would add to the forest. His magic was still growing.

She knew it then as she walked his horse back, leading with a gentle hand and soft encouragement. She knew it more when she stepped into the clearing, noting that he had not moved save for the hand gently stroking the baby’s wispy curls, looking like he had not _breathed_ since he heard her answer to his question.

This night was hard on him, she knew. The crisis with the baby, which she still did not fully understand—something had happened in the loop that Draco had not intended, but it was nothing they could help now that it was gone. And now this. He needed someone to guide him, or he would truly be lost forever.

She crouched beside him, not making a sound. _Like a cat_ , Draco’s shock-dulled mind thought distantly.

“You must go,” she told him. Something within the recesses of his mind and heart stirred with the direct order, a compulsion that never occurred unless—

“You really are her,” he said hoarsely.

She nodded slowly. Her fiery curls, tangled and defying gravity around her face, had the look of a wild mane. The magic had already begun changing her into something that was not quite human, but not yet fae. Draco noticed that her cheekbones were sharper, her eyes larger and more luminous, and something in the way she held herself became even more graceful and regal than before. _A lioness,_ his dazed mind thought.

 “Before the night is up,” she coaxed him.

But he had to ask before he moved. “Did you know that would happen?” The question was quiet with a waver in his voice. He marveled at how calm she seemed.

In fact, she was not calm. She was terrified and worked hard not to show it. It was a skill that Draco had, in part, unknowingly taught her. She could not let her fear rule her.

After all, she was the ruler, now. “I had a hunch,” she replied briskly. “But I didn’t know for certain.”

 _If you can’t beat them_ … she thought, the cliché in one part sourness, one part smugness, and not a small bit of pride. _Become them._

“Are you…fae, now?” Draco asked uncertainly, one hand tightening slightly around the baby. 

“Would you like to stay and find out?” she shot back. “Or would you like to get out of this hell hole?”

Draco bit his lip and reluctantly let her help him up ungracefully onto the back of the horse, maneuvering awkwardly so he wouldn’t crush the boy. His steed only seemed mildly perturbed, pawing at the soft ground impatiently and huffing out a puff of air that sounded suspiciously like a put-upon sigh. Draco shifted the bundle in his arms and laid down a few more silencing and cushioning charms distractedly. No matter how hard he tried to look away, his gaze always crept back to the sapling in the center of so much destruction.

 _Life out of death._ Fitting, for the night of rebirth. A new life for all four of them.

Draco looked down at Rouqine, riddled with guilt and worry. He didn’t want to leave her here alone, though he had a feeling she’d inhabited the forest long before he was even born. And with the power thrumming through her bloodstream, she would never truly be alone again. She had the forest for as long as it chose her. “But what will you do?”

Her smile was soft for him, though it turned hard as she talked. “The fae are chaos-causers,” she said. “When out of time, our destinies are fated, but those within it are ours to toy with.” She sniffed. “Hopefully your dearest is more dependable than mine. It seems I’m also terrible at letting things go. It’s best not to trouble oneself with the subjectivities of morality, here.”

Draco chewed his lip. An eternity of mucking things up and keeping grudges didn’t seem like much of a life at all—he should know, it had been his for the first seventeen years of his existence. But things would be better now.

The forest responded to every twitch of Rouqine’s fingers, every syllable on her tongue, every thought in her mind. He knew, because as a being of the forest, he felt it. And like the Queen before her, that part of his magic inside him which was one with the forest yearned to do what she wanted.

She scrutinized him for a beat and added thoughtfully, “I’m also not sure what happened at your loop, but it had to be done.” Her eyes bore into his, as though she could convince him with the sheer force of her gaze. Her lips quirked. “The fates are tricky. Needs must, darling.” She smiled her typical, ironic and thin-lipped grimace while raising her eyebrows, indicating a reference to herself as well as him.

“But I don’t want to leave you,” Draco said, an echo of something said seven years prior to a different strong, brave, powerful woman.

“The forest always has a place for you,” she promised with finality that Draco did not feel. “If you can’t have a place for it, I’ll find you.”

Draco couldn’t understand why she was so tranquil about her fate. He didn’t understand why she wasn’t screaming as he would have been doing in her place, most likely while curled up in the fetal position and sobbing.

He didn’t know that she’d gotten what she wanted.

There was no way out of the deepest, darkest parts of the forest for her. She had lived there too long. And for too long, it had conquered her. The darkest parts of the forest had become the darkest parts of herself.

Now, she took herself back, and took the forest too.

She would never be conquered again.

She needed no one.

She freed herself.

Not even the hands of a man she used to love, outstretched to catch her as she leapt from the back of a racing white horse in the dark of night.

What Draco didn’t know was that, finally, she’d won.

“Will you remember me?” she asked, knowing, after it all, that it might be too much for him to return to any part of it—even if that part of it was her.

“You’ve saved my life too many times,” he said, taking her hand and pressing a kiss to it. How different her hand felt in his than Harry’s, and how wonderful it would be to finally feel his outside of a dream. “I won’t let you slip away.” Not like his drainpipe memories, trickling away with the bathwater his first few weeks after bargaining with the Queen. These memories, he would latch onto with all his strength.

One could only truly live forever if they were remembered, after all. Draco had gone nameless long enough to know.

As if she’d read his mind, she replied, “Then remember me with my name.”

She stepped close to his ear, tugging him down just enough to whisper into it. “My name is Brigid,” she breathed, the winter wind on her breath, an icy river rapid clashing through her voice, a frost-bitten bud still determinedly cracking through the cold. “Remember me, darling.”

And with a shiver down his spine and a flower blooming in his chest, Draco knew he would.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> After many edits comes...this thing. I hope you guys like it! Took me a while to figure out how I wanted the big bang with the Queen to go, and I'm not sure if I quite nailed it or not. I might edit this again later on, but I kept coming back to it and re-reading it, so I figured I'd best post it before I make myself sick of it.


	15. Chapter 15

 

Harry paced.

The moon sank in the sky.

 _Where is he?_ he wondered anxiously. He was not prone to biting his nails, but eight out of ten were now gnawed to the quick. Even though he wasn’t a smoker, if he’d had a pack of cigarettes, he would have started simply for something to do instead of wallow in worry. If felt like he’d been waiting for hours—he cast a quick _Tempus_ , and, behold, he actually had been. Just staring at nothing in the darkness of the forest, afraid to tear his tired, dry eyes away from it in case something spectacular happened.  

Then, something did happen. A rustling in the leaves, a strange movement in the breeze and a certain stillness in the air that caught his attention.

He could hear a noise, far away. The rhythmic pounding of hooves on a hard surface. He blinked and peered into the forest, adjusting his glasses and squinting into the gloom, searching for the source of the noise. He stepped forward—

And reared backwards as a silvery white stallion burst from between the trees.

On his back was a person Harry had begun to doubt he’d ever see. His face blotchy and wind-whipped, eyes screwed closed against the wind and the branches, ducking his cheek into his shoulder.  

Blinking as he left the forest, with mere seconds until he returned, wild grey eyes met astonished green.

He kept one hand wrapped around his bundle and outstretched the other.

Finally, after so long waiting, Harry took it.

The thin fingers and warm palm felt as though it belonged there, in his hand. He took it and pulled him close, tumbling off his still-moving steed, the two of them falling heavily on the grass beside them.

Their first meeting in seven years, and Draco knocked the wind out of Harry. He scrambled away as Harry bent over and coughed until his eyes watered. He checked the baby  as he did so—but he slept on, unperturbed.

“Are you alright?” Draco asked worriedly, his voice shaking a bit. Of course, his first few seconds out of the woods, and he had already managed to hurt someone.

Harry wheezed a laugh. “You’re so beautiful,” he croaked, slowly standing and brushing himself off, “that you took—my breath away.”

Draco laughed because he felt like he might cry from relief. This ridiculous, stupid man. And then he really did start crying. If it was high-pitched and hysterical, well, he felt it was warranted.

He felt the force of his affection, and rushed into Harry’s arms.

Harry pressed his nose to the top of his head and breathed in. _Cinnamon and autumn leaves._ Just like in his dreams.  

But different, so different, because “God, you’re really here,” he marveled, amazed and jubilant beyond words.

Draco shuddered in his arms, unable to hug him back for the baby.

“Who’ve you brought with you?” Harry asked softly, feeling as though he shouldn’t speak too loudly or he might wake something—the baby, the forest, the misty grey stillness around them; he wasn’t sure what.

Draco sniffled, trying to wipe away his snot and tears one-handed before he became too ghastly a sight. He knew his face was blotchy and his eyes were red, Merlin, he hated how _pink_ his complexion could get when he was distressed.

“He’s—he’s the other,” he said hesitantly. _When he finds out he’ll be horrified_ , the sly, sadistic little voice in his head said. _Disgusted. He’ll toss you back to the forest._

“The other what?” Harry asked, rubbing a thumb across Draco’s cheekbone in a manner he hoped was reassuring, trying to get Draco to show him the bundle in his arms.

“The other—” Draco swallowed audibly and moved the blankets and protection spells, revealing his little round face. “The other me.”

Harry found he had lost the ability to breathe, other than the wheezed “oh” on a shocked exhale.

Harry knew what a Changeling was. Narcissa had told him all about that fateful day. But Harry had thought that taken children never came back, that they always met some sort of malicious end in the forts. He never expected Draco to actually _find_ the baby he’d replaced, let alone bring him back!

“How?” Harry managed.

Draco’s face had become a patchwork of fever-flushed pink and pallid white. His breathing became shallower, only perceptible because Harry was so close to him, and the look in his eye became rather manic, like prey looking for somewhere to hide. He shivered again, his hair falling into his eyes and bringing Harry’s attention to the dried tear tracks that left thin, salty lines down the side of his face.

Harry realized that his question was not one Draco could handle right now, something he felt rather ashamed of not grasping before he’d blurted it out. He _shushed_ him gently instead of waiting for a response, carding his fingers through his hair.

“We’ll go,” Harry murmured, deciding for Draco, who seemed wholly lost. “I’m going to Side-Along you, alright?”

“Where?” Draco rasped.

“My place,” Harry answered, and then they disappeared in the mist of the rising sun.

A new day had come, and with it, new life. Reborn.

 

_*_  

 

Harry had fantasized often about what would happen when he got Draco back.

He thought about it in the lulls at work, while waiting in long lines, and while trying to fall asleep.

He’d had the thought—an unrealistic, whimsical fantasy, he knew—that they would return from the side of the forest with Draco in his arms, joyful and happy and finally together. They wouldn’t fight or bicker and Draco would finally shake off the melancholy that followed him like shadows through the dreams, and he would laugh his rare, bright laugh that made his whole face light up, and that they would kiss for ages, exploring each other’s bodies in a way that was both familiar and new. He would take him to bed and ravish him without any of the desperation or bitter sweetness that had been present before the war or in his dreams, because he was _there_ and _safe_ and _staying._

He did not picture Draco backing away from him with a hand splayed in front of him as if to ward Harry off, apologizing brokenly, “I’m sorry, I-I—you shouldn’t. We shouldn’t. It won’t—I’m just—”

The baby, awoken by the twist of apparition, began to wail. Draco _shush_ ed him, making nonsensical little noises and trying to calm him down, though he felt distinctly rattled himself. None of the cogs in his mind seemed to be functioning together anymore—everything was so disjointed, so displaced.

“What do you mean?” Harry asked, staying in the same place he’d apparated to, afraid to move for fear of making Draco back away even farther.

“I’m _cursed_ , Harry, don’t you see?” Draco asked urgently, his voice low but intense. “I’ve ruined everything.”

Harry had to scoff. “Draco, you _saved_ everything,” he said, shaking his head disbelievingly. “You got both yourself and the baby out of the forest!”

“But that’s just it!” Draco hissed, the baby’s comfort being the only reason he muffled the yell he wanted his voice to be. “He wasn’t in the forest! He was out of time!”

“What’s that mean?”

Draco sighed, scowling, and tugged one-handed at his messy hair. His irritated expression looked so much like when they were back in school, hunched over a book, trying to solve a formula he couldn’t understand—for a moment Harry was pulled back there in the musty library, peering at him from between bookshelves, unable to approach him with Pansy and Blaise flanking his table at either side.

“There was a bit of fractured time,” Draco tried to explain, speaking as fast as he could while trying not to think about what he was saying, hoping the riddles wouldn't catch up to him. “A loop of it, that just kept repeating itself. He was stuck in it. Every time, Mum, she—she would turn away, and a fae would snatch him, and then it would revert back. I-I thought I was getting him out before the other fae came, but then I—” Draco took a swift, pained breath. “I realized after I’d done it that _I_ was the other fae.”

Harry tried to mull over and make sense of the information Draco gave him. It had obviously cost him a lot, from the heaviness of his breath. Harry wished fervently that he had Hermione’s practical mind, or Luna’s whimsical powers of perception, but he didn’t. “Well, then,” Harry said, rolling rather slowly to his conclusion, “it seems to me like you saved him anyway.”

Draco glared at him, confused. “How?”

Harry shrugged. “Otherwise, he would have been stuck in the loop. He never could have grown up, because you’d already done so.”

“Yes, but…” But there were so many other variances. There were so many other fluxuations in time. There were so many different outcomes…

Harry saw the stubbornness on Draco’s face and tried a different approach. “Look,” he began. “Time doesn’t exist in the forts, right?”

“Right…”

“So the fae can go back and forth throughout it, but the rest of us stay barreling straight ahead.”

Draco nodded, almost imperceptibly.

“Then the way I see it, everything has happened the way it was supposed to, with or without the fae.” Harry dared to approach Draco, his hands spread wide and his steps slow and measured, as he would approach a feral animal. “You’re here and safe. The baby gets to live his life—twenty years and change, give or take, isn’t that big of a shift in the grand scheme of things. It’s not like you accidentally threw him two hundred years in the past. And Narcissa gets you _and_ him. _And_ I get to live! What might have happened if you hadn’t grown up yourself? If he’d been you instead?” 

Harry touched his cheek lightly. Draco flinched, but didn’t pull back, his eyes that steel grey they became when he was trying to protect himself or was particularly set on something. Harry made an educated guess in assuming that in this moment, it was both. “He would never have gotten called into the forest, because he wasn’t a fae. He would never have helped me with the Horcruxes. He would certainly never have been there to persuade Narcissa to _lie to Voldemort_. Draco, without you, I would probably be dead. Without you most of Britain probably would be, too.” 

Harry pushed his hair back from his forehead and then, emboldened by Draco’s acceptance of it, leaned in slowly and kissed him there, sensing that even this gesture was a big risk in Draco’s tense and flighty state. He pressed their foreheads together so he had no choice but to look into his face. “You’re not _cursed_ ,” Harry said, putting as much emotion as he could into his words. “You’re a _blessing_ , Draco.”

Draco bit his lips, his brow crinkling. “How do you know?” he asked, genuinely trying to find an answer.

“I know because it’s true,” Harry said with conviction.

Draco scoffed, but Harry could see the small lines next to his mouth, indents from trying not to give into a small smile. “Nothing true exists,” he muttered, biting his lips before he started to riddle, but Harry could feel some of the tension leaving his body. “You’re ridiculous.”

“Alright?” he asked, his hand rubbing up and down Draco’s arm.

Draco sighed and looked up at him with uncharacteristic vulnerability, the steel slowly melting away, his eyes bright as clear water and terribly troubled. “What if she hates me?” he asked, worry stealing his volume. He ended the question mouthing the words more than voicing them, the sound stalling at the word _hate_ and not returning, fear taking it away in his throat and holding it captive.

“ _Oh_ ,” Harry said, pulling him in close and holding him tightly as though that would protect him from his own emotions. “ _No_ , Draco. Don’t think that. She loves you so much, honey.”

“But what if?” he insisted, his voice—much stronger now from irritation and impatience, because Harry didn’t really answer his question—muffled by Harry’s shirt.

“Then we’ll just carry on anyway,” he replied. “You’ll live here with me and you can hang out with that daft snake you like so much, spend time, I dunno, reading or watching telly or getting a job or whatever you want to do with your life now.”

Draco raised his eyebrows. “So you know that was me, then?”

Harry shot him a look. “You know, I’m not nearly as obtuse as you said I was in school,” he said. “I can be observant on occasion.”

Draco laughed, and Harry didn’t know if it was at his words or at him, but he didn’t really care as long as it got him to smile like that more often. “I had such good insults in school though.”

He scoffed. “Please. Potty? _Scarhead?_ Very original, Malfoy.”

Draco’s lips twitched. “You like when I call you Scarhead.”

Harry changed the subject. “I’ll put on tea, yeah?” he smiled, still rubbing soothing circles into his back. He knew Narcissa needed to know he was back, but seeing her would only send Draco into another panic, so he didn’t mention it. And the thought of telling Ron and Hermione what happened made him cringe. “Let’s transfigure a crib so the baby can sleep in the room over. Want a shower?” He knew how much Draco hated being dirty, and now that he was calmer, he took in the dirt and grime and twigs which clung to him and stuck in his hair, and the blood from tiny thornbush cuts and scrapes dried on his arms.

Draco exhaled, releasing the last of his apprehension and worry. He nodded, reluctantly handing the baby over to Harry's arms and threading his fingers through the one's belonging to Harry's free hand—a gesture that seemed so personal now in real space and time, but one he did in spite of the tiny voice with his father’s inflection prodding him to distance himself—and let himself be lead to the bathroom.

“I’ll leave fresh clothes out for you,” he promised. Draco looked conflicted, like he didn’t want the walls between himself and the two of them. Perhaps he was and opened his mouth to say so, but seemed to think better of it. He was a very solitary person by nature. He needed some time to himself just to piece back together everything that had happened over the course of the last few hours, and didn’t want to scare Harry by crying in front of him again in case it happened. He didn’t even know _why_ he kept crying, whether it was from happiness or guilt or grief or just simply because he was overwhelmed, and so he couldn’t hope to explain it to anyone else.

He shut the door quietly and turned on the water.

 


	16. Chapter 16

Harry debated for a while as he listened to the water, but decided to firecall Narcissa as she’d asked him to upon retrieving Draco. Neither of them had even entertained the idea that he wouldn’t succeed—there was too much at stake.

She was desperate to see him, Harry could tell from the tightness of her mouth and the wide, shining quality her eyes took on. He had obviously woken her up, with her hair pulled into a disconcertingly disheveled bun and puffy bags under her eyes pointing to difficulty sleeping, and even with her staunch sense of decorum, she had answered immediately anyway.

But Harry didn’t think Draco could handle meeting her again right now. He didn’t tell her about the baby, because that was Draco’s secret to confront, but he did tell her how distraught he was. Even then, she still insisted on seeing him up until Harry reluctantly told her about Draco’s question, knowing the other man would probably be furious if he found out Harry had spoken to someone else about something he’d said in confidentiality.

“Ah,” Narcissa replied. Her face shifted, but her mask was put in place too rapidly for Harry to discern what sort of difficult emotion was there. He assumed the revelation that her son was terrified of discovering that she blamed him for her family's misfortune was a difficult one to grasp. “Well, then. Perhaps it would be better to wait until he is thinking more clearly.”

Harry agreed to call her again when Draco was feeling a bit more chipper, and they departed with a heartfelt plea from Narcissa to hasten their reunion as quickly as Draco could, just in time for Harry to hear the water shut off.

 _Draco’s here_ , he thought giddily even as a massive yawn split his face, the reality of the situation finally sinking in. _He’s right there in the bathroom—it's not a dream, he’s really, actually here._

 

_*_

 

Draco finally turned off the shower after about twenty minutes of silent sobbing while curled in the fetal position on the shower floor. He felt as though his heart had been ripped out, and no longer knew what to do without the forest's kind embrace around him.

The steady ache in his chest was dulled by the tears and hot water, though it remained throughout. And beside it was a tightness from sheer joy, a pressure so intense it made it difficult for him to breathe. He could have his life back. He could be with his mum, spend time with Pansy and Astoria and Blaise, if they still wanted him after so long—all people he longed for in nostalgia, but the thought of actually meeting them now made his throat dry with anxiety.

And, of course, he could be with Harry.  

He didn’t know how it was possible to grieve and celebrate at once, but he did it then. It was something Harry and all the others had learned seven years ago, when the war ended. That feeling of having gotten through, but not realizing quite yet that what they were fighting was gone. Suspended between two separate and distinct existences. 

And so the tears streamed down his face, trailing his happiness, sadness, and all of his other feelings down his cheeks and into the drain with the rest.

 

_*_

 

Harry’s heart gave a funny wrenching sensation when Draco walked out of the bathroom with tousled hair dampened to gold, wearing Harry’s comfiest well-worn jumper and an overlong pair of his sweatpants.

“You studied at LSE?” Draco asked incredulously through a yawn that he tried and failed to cover with his hand, addressing the logo emblazoned on the front of the jumper as Harry took his hand and lead him through the little house.

Harry chuckled and shook his head. Not even his fatigue could dampen his mood. “No, Hermione did. She’s on the Economic Reform Commission at the Ministry.”

The blonde raised one sardonic eyebrow. “Has she gotten people to listen to her P.U.K.E. rubbish yet?”

“It’s S.P.E.W., and it’s not rubbish,” Harry said, a little piqued at the jab. Draco could rib him all he wanted, but he remembered how he’d acted to Ron and Hermione during school, and it was still treacherous territory for the two of them. “She’s helped a lot of magical creatures.”

Draco sighed. “Yes, I suppose she has. She always was so very Gryffindor. You should tell her I’be been nonhuman, technically; she’ll be up in arms ready to defend my honor in no time, asking for equal pay and voting rights.”

Harry snorted. “You already get both of those things. And I think she might take a bit more convincing than that. But speaking of school...would you like your wand back?”

Draco side-eyed him in surprise. "You kept it?"

Harry nodded. "I'd thought I had just picked it up in the chaos of battle, before I started dreaming of you. I put it through every scanning spell the Ministry had to offer, but no one could figure out who it belonged to. I kept it in a box in my closet that I'd take out and look at every so often--I figured the original owner had died. I thought it was the best I could do to remember them." Harry shrugged. "Now I don't have to."

"Ah." Draco paused, thinking. Eventually, he said dubiously, "I don't think it will work for me." He hoped Harry wouldn't press the subject. That person, the boy who had once used that wand, didn't exist anymore. There were chasms between them. Draco didn't want to be reminded, even if it may have been a better change--in other ways, it was also a worse one. 

"Well, it's in the closet on the top shelf, just in case." Draco was grateful when Harry didn't continue. 

Meandering through a doorway tiredly, Draco found that they reached the bedroom, where a large snake was curled up in the spot of sun from the skylight on Harry’s bed. “Ah,” his owner said. “I was wondering where you went.”

Draco peered past him in the door frame. “Oh,” he said, spotting Ziti. “Hello again.”

 _You ssssssmell different_ , Ziti accused, addressing Draco.

“Yeah, I’m sure he does,” Harry said, entering his room and letting go of Draco’s hand to toss off the stiff formal robes that he _still_ had not taken off and throw on a pair of flannel pyjamas. “But you can sleep anywhere, and we can’t. Get out.”

Ziti looked back and forth from Harry to Draco. It seemed Draco was also communicating with him, though not through Parseltongue, nor any sound at all. _Fine_ , Ziti finally consented, slithering down from the covers next to Harry’s thigh. _But not becaussse you told me to. And he’s bossy._

 Harry _tsk_ d. “He’s moody,” he told Draco.

“I’m aware,” he replied, still standing a little stiffly in the doorway. This was all so _normal_ looking, when Draco hadn’t been in a real house for so long, let alone slept in a real bed and not something conjured or transfigured or simply magicked up. And the pressing weight of fatigue was something he had never experienced so forcefully out of time—while he was in the forest, it healed him of most things (besides his exposure to magic sickness), and he only really slept when he felt like it, not because he needed it.

And he’d slept with Harry before, both of the literal and figurative type, but he’d never…never been in a bed with him.

Harry pulled back the covers and held out his arms. “Come on, then,” he coaxed gently. “You don’t have to be polite around me, Draco.”

Draco swallowed and scolded himself, trying to banish the tired jitters that stubbornly stayed in his stomach. Of course he didn’t, not after what they’d been through.Though that little insidious voice said that he'd never be worth it, Harry had proved it wrong. Harry had done so much for him. _Right?_

That question spun around his head.  _Am I right_ _?_ he thought.  _Or is it?_

Too wary to ask, he walked to Harry instead. He crossed the room swiftly and pulled the covers around him, feeling how soft the blankets were around him and marveling that they were actually made out of real materials, and not magic and intention. He shifted and turned in close to Harry, one hand on his bare chest, feeling the warmth of his skin and the rise of his breath and the strength of his steadily beating heart.

Harry’s arms encircled him, close but not demanding, chest to chest with Draco’s head resting between his neck and shoulder because he needed to feel his breath on his skin, his hair tickle his cheek, his eyelids flutter closed. He had to hold him so he could see his face, because if he looked away he had the irrational fear that Draco would dissolve into thin air.

Draco fell asleep almost as his head hit the pillow. He must have been even more exhausted than Harry thought, and had he not been so fatigued, he would have cheered inside at how much Draco trusted him. But, as his own eyelids drooped, he reluctantly yielded to peaceful nothingness.

Softly, they fell into peaceful sleep, curled around each other in forgiving oblivion.

 

_*_

 

When Harry woke up later that day, Draco wasn’t there.


	17. Chapter 17

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey friends!
> 
> In this chapter I've included something that I made reference to a long time ago, back in chapter 1 of part 1. At the time I thought it was an interesting little headcanon, but then the more I kept mulling it over the more I figured it would be important to include in the story, so here it is!
> 
> Much love and do comment! I love hearing your thoughts. 
> 
> <3

Harry searched everywhere. He got out of bed and went from the room, forcing himself to walk despite his rapidly escalating heartbeat.

He peered in the kitchen and the small dining room. The crib where they’d set up the baby was empty, not even the baby blanket Hary had transfigured there. He began to walk faster.

He checked the living space and finally the bathroom. No one was there, no one but Ziti, who watched him with one orange eye.

“Where is he?” Harry tersely asked him.

 _He didn’t say_.

“When did he leave?”

_A few hourssss ago._

Harry took a deep, stuttering breath and sat down on the couch, his hands raking through his hair and tugging on it. _The forest took him. It took him, it took him, it took him, he’s gone, he’s gone_ —

Harry couldn’t do this by himself.

Without bothering to brush his hair or change, he blasted a haphazard lighting spell at the fireplace and threw a generous fistful of powder into the flames. He flooed to the two people he knew would always help him.

 

_*_

 

Harry stopped himself just before yelling out Hermione’s name. _Baby Hugo_ , he thought, catching himself abruptly.

“Hermione?” he called softly, panic and fear in his voice that he hadn’t heard since the war. How many times, he wondered, had he come to her lost and hopeless, and looked to her to solve everything? _Too many_.

“Harry?” she asked, padding in from the kitchen in her socks, a casual pair of jeans and a sweater thrown on. Her curls were tied up in a bun, wrapped around her wand, which she only did when she was having a particularly relaxing day and didn’t want to misplace it while she got lost in a book. She paused when she took in his distraught and bedraggled state. “What’s wrong?”

“I have to tell you something,” he replied. “Is Ron here?”

“No, he went off to the grocery for dinner,” she said, motioning to the couch. “Sit down, what’s happened?”

Harry sighed, his leg jittering from stress, unable to calm down. “It’s a long story.”

Hermione shrugged. “I can make time,” she said.

“You always do.”

“Mm-hmm.”

He shook his head, dragging a hand through his already hopelessly disheveled hair. He didn’t know if she would remember him—but now that he was back, the spell was broken, was it not? Surely the forest wouldn’t hold onto him so hard that even out of it he was exiled. “I…It’s about Malfoy.”

Hermione’s eyebrows flew towards her hairline. “Malfoy’s been missing for seven years,” she said.

Harry exhaled, glad, at least, to have that figured out. “Not anymore,” he replied. “Well, I suppose he is missing again now, but for about twelve hours he wasn’t.”

Hermione opened and closed her mouth, blinking slowly. “I’ll make tea,” she said decisively. “I think we could all use some.”

Harry vehemently agreed with her.

 

_*_

 

Pressing the baby closer to him, Draco cautiously peered around Diagon Alley. He had glamoured himself to look like a slightly older man than he was in actuality, with neat dark hair, brown eyes, and a round, forgettable face. His thumb stroked the baby’s wispy hair, feeling the little child’s small breaths on his neck.

The moment he’d woken him up, he’d begun shrieking. Draco'd had to silence the kitchen so Harry wouldn’t wake up, and realized as his stomach began to grumble that the baby must have been hungry as well.

 _Odd_ , he thought, feeling the uncomfortable emptiness there. In the forest he’d never really felt hungry—he’d only eaten when he wanted to taste things, like in the festivals, or when he was bored. He had never really thought of it before, but he had to assume that, as creatures so saturated in magic, the magic of the forest was enough for them to subsist by. The fact that there was no time in the forest also made it even more confusing—since time didn't exist, when he ate could have been a minute previous and it could have been a year before, and both would have meant exactly nothing.

He had found some bananas and milk and mashed the two together in what he hoped was an acceptable approximation of baby food. The result, though initially successful, was a horrifying stream of partially-digested yellow mush shot down his back two minutes after the child happily gobbled it up, and then the ensuing cleaning enchantment so strong that his jumper—well, Harry’s jumper, really—was still stiff and smelt faintly burnt, even walking down the Ally thirty minutes later. He’d taken off the sleep pants in lieu of some overlong jeans that he’d pilfered from Harry’s closet. He may once have scoffed at the wardrobe, but since he had traveled through time and seen all sorts of bizarre attire, he had fewer qualms now. At least this was comfy. And smelled reassuringly of Harry, if masked slightly by baby sick.

He really should have transfigured a pram of some sort for him, but Draco was the first to admit that he had no clue how to raise a baby. And he didn’t like the thought of him being so close to the ground—what if someone wasn’t looking where they were going and accidentally kicked the pram, or what if there was a mean dog about? No, it was too risky; better to keep him closer.

A wizard shoved past him and he flinched. In the forest there was always so much _space_ that no one ever touched unless they wanted to, unless the new moon was high and the inhabitants of the forts were fit to dance. He would have to get used to this pressing crush again, full of witches and wizards rushing home after a long day’s work - thought, to their credit, most people went out of their way to avoid jostling him once they spotted the baby in his arms. He breathed out slowly through his nose and closed his eyes, calming himself down for a moment. He had to press on. 

He had someone to see.

The little boy reached up and took a chunk of Draco’s hair in his pudgy fist, tugging on it rather viciously. Draco winced and attempted to gently untangle himself one-handedly while he walked down the street to his destination.

 _Weasley’s Wizard Wheezes_ , the sign read. Harry had mentioned going there in a dream, and Draco had felt magic in the forest that seemed similar to the magic pouring from the store. Draco was sure the remaining twin would be there—and he was sure he could give him some insight, some answers, even if he was his second choice of the two to talk to. He’d always had a hunch about them, and meeting the plethora of other fae in the forest justified it—for some reason, they seemed oddly attracted to red-heads, especially pureblood, magical ones.

When he entered the shop he was immediately assaulted by a barrage of light, colour and sound. He put a hurried shield around the baby without quite consciously acknowledging it - he'd already knocked the wind out of Harry, that was plenty of injuries for his first twenty-four hours back in the real world. Fizzing whiz-bangs exploded in the corner to the delight of a gaggle of raucous schoolboys; by the displays, a little girl turned her brother into a giant canary, much to the chagrin of their haggard mother. One tired looking woman disinterestedly perused the love potions section, picking bottles up and setting them down without reading them.

Trying to sort through the organized chaos, Draco found a red-topped head bobbing through customers towards the back of the shop. He stepped back, rather than try himself to weave through the maze that the customers presented, and waited for his shadows to help him.

 _Strange_ , Draco thought, a line forming between his eyebrows. He took another little step backwards, waiting for their familiar cool slide to encompass him and help him set off where he needed to go.

Instead, a small child poked him in the hip with one grubby finger. “Excuse me! You’re in front of the exploding bubble gum!”

“Ah,” he murmured, stepping away and letting the little girl run through. But where were his shadows? Had he lost them? The thought made him feel unbalanced and vaguely panicked. The shadows always helped him in the forest, to take him away from those who feared him or meant him harm. The only time they hadn’t done so was when he’d been distracted, searching for the magic with Harry’s signature that he’d felt just out of the forest’s reach, and an angry thief he’d beguiled into the woods with feigned innocence and a pocket of jangling fool’s gold stabbed him in the thigh. It had been his own fault, and even then the forest had helped him—when he’d transformed himself and shot away, faster on three legs than one, the forest nevertheless brought him to what he’d been searching for.

What was he to do without it?

He felt so vulnerable, just by himself. Anything could hurt him. Anyone.

Sustained in an existence heady off power for the past seven years, he hadn’t felt anything like this terrifying weakness since the early days of the war - when the Death Eaters had begun to move into the Manor; when he’d locked himself in his room from the inside to keep out Bella and Greyback; when he’d looked into Potter’s eyes through a grimy bathroom mirror.

“Can I help you?” a friendly voice cut through his spiraling thoughts. He jerked his chin up to see a pair of mischievous brown eyes looking down at him. All the Weasleys were far too tall for their own good, Draco concluded.

“Yes,” he said slowly. “I believe you can.”

“What do you need?” George asked. “We have all sorts of things, though I’ll have to warn you that many of our products aren’t safe near infants.” He gave the baby a pointed look.

“Could I actually have a word with you in private?” Draco asked. His glamour itched. He wanted to get out of it.

“Certainly,” George replied smoothly, turning to weave around customers once more and seemingly unperturbed by the jarring explosion that sounded from the second floor. Draco subtly reinforced the shield.

Thankfully, the back rooms were much more peaceful than the front, darker and stacked floor to ceiling with boxes, large and small. There was a worn wooden table with a few chairs around it, a moneybox on the counter, and a few other odds and ends.

“All the experiments happen on the second floor,” George said, noting the way Draco peered around. “That’s where our lab is. Better ventilation up there.”

“Ah,” Draco said, unsure of how to continue. He decided bluntness was better. He was dealing with a Weasley, after all.

When he let his glamour drop, George’s jaw comically opened on its own accord and hung there for a moment, his eyes bugging out of his head. The baby gurgled at the change of color, once again reaching for Draco’s hair. He distractedly gave him a finger to squeeze in his tiny grip instead, eyes locked on George.

“Do you know who I am?” Draco asked, wondering, as Harry had, if the Queen’s curse had released him.

“Draco Malfoy,” George said, with a hint of disbelief and—was that admiration?—in his tone. “You bastard! In the flesh. They say you’ve been dead for seven years. Did you have a nice time in France? Or Italy, maybe? I’ve heard Sicily is nice this time of year.”

“I’ve never been to Sicily,” Draco said, his voice icing over just enough to give it an edge. He’d struck too close to home—Draco had been back and forth from France to England during his childhood, and if not for his father’s ties with Voldemort, they may very well have fled there during the war. In a different time, perhaps.

“What can I do for you?” George asked, putting one foot up to the side of the table and using it to rock his chair back and forth. The very picture of arrogant relaxation. Though, Draco wondered, if George projected as Harry did the confident facade he wanted everyone to see - as Draco did, too.

“I…have a question,” Draco confessed hesitantly, turning away to scrutinize the labels on the endless boxes around him. “Many questions, actually.”

“About what?”

“Your brother.”

Draco heard the two chair legs _thunk_ to the ground. “Which one?”

Draco dared a glance back at him. “You know the one.”

George frowned. “Why are you here? Why now? Why after seven years of disappearance, you come here instead of your posh Manor or some rich villa? And whose baby is that?”

“He’s my mother’s,” Draco admitted. “From twenty-four years ago.” He paused, searching the redhead’s face. “Do you know what I mean?”

He couldn’t get too close to speaking about it without beginning to riddle, and he didn’t want to frighten the other man away. Though if Draco's hunch was correct, he probably wouldn’t think him crazy if he began to speak in roundabouts, though he might flee all the same.

George’s eyebrows drew down as he looked from one face to the other. “Why is he so young?”

“He was stuck,” Draco said. “Among the trees. Where the other is, now.”

“The other.”

Draco nodded. _Bluntness is better. He’s a Weasley, after all._ “Your other.”

“You know he’s there?” George asked in a hushed tone, hope a tiny flame in his eyes, hurt and grief smoking around it and nearly snuffing it out.

“He’s there in the way we’re all there, in the end,” Draco said, making a concerted effort to keep his words on track. The baby grabbed at his thumb, yanking hard. Draco hissed and tried to extricate himself slowly, smoothing the baby’s downy hair back gently in the hopes of distracting him. “You’ve visited him.”

It was a statement, not a question. The feeling of his magic was one that Draco found similar—he had walked the same tree-lined trails as him, once. But he’d never gotten pulled into the forts, never participated in the revelry with the fae. Draco was certain he had his twin to thank for that, turning the forest’s whims in his favor and distracting the other fae from his brother.

“I’ve wandered through the forest,” George admitted. “Quite often. It feels…comforting, somehow.”

Draco nodded. “He’s like you,” Draco said, jutting his chin to the little boy in his arms, peering around at nothing.

George gave him a measured look, one that Draco couldn’t help but look away from. “I...am to Fred what he is to you.”

“Yes.”

George leaned back so far in his chair that Draco feared he would fall. “I knew there was something off about you, ever since the first time I saw your pointy little first-year scowl,” he said, amazement plain in his tone. “That’s why you’re here?”

“I have to know,” he started haltingly, “if you ever…resented…him. Or, was angry with him, for…”

George raised his eyebrows. “For being himself?”

Draco didn’t answer, which was answer enough. Once again, the chair landed on all four legs.

“There were times I resented my brother,” George admitted, rubbing his forehead and hiding his face from view in doing so. “He often took the lead, and sometimes the spotlight. But it made me feel special, being the one with him on every adventure. We shared everything. When we were little, I acted as his translator. He would rhyme like you’re trying not to.”

Draco wondered if George was uniquely observant, or if he just wasn’t as good at hiding himself as he used to be. Either way he stayed quiet, biting his lips to keep his riddling at bay. The forest had taught him that people often continue talking if one just continues to listen.

“And the only thing I ever hated him for was dying. God, I was so mad.” He paused, shaking his head. “I still am, really, but it’s…duller now.”

Draco took in a long breath, his lips pursed. “You loved him.”

“Of course I did. I still do, even though he’s gone. He’s my brother.” George's voice cracked despite him. 

Draco nodded. The tight feeling in his chest was back. And, cautiously, he had to ask, "Why are you telling me this?"

George shrugged. "When someone is gone, no one seems to know how to talk about it, you know? Everyone...just kind of gets this expression on their face when I try talk about him, like they pity me. And then they don't know what to say. Even my own family does it, sometimes. I know they don't mean to, but it's kind of hard to get over when I look just like him." His voice took on a sheepish quality and he scratched the back of his head, a red flush creeping up his cheeks and on the tips of his ears, clashing with his hair. "It's not like I'm in mourning anymore-it's been seven years-but I like to talk about him, every once in a while. Even if it makes some people uncomfortable. Just to know...that he's not forgotten."

Draco breath caught in his chest, and the words he didn't speak burned.

 _Remember me with my name_.

What a tricky thing, memory was. Time was. Life, in general, was.

To walk down Diagon Alley instead of through the forest. To speak to others, instead of himself. To listen to what they told him, even when it hurt. How difficult that was.

The baby, blinking beneath him, reached for his chin.

“I have to go.”

 

_*_

 

Draco left the shop with his head in a different universe. Thinking about brothers and forests and lost girls and time loops, he’d forgotten to put his glamour on.

The first person who recognized him did a double take and walked into a wall. The second person’s neck whipped around so violently Draco was sure they’d be stuck like that. The third person gasped and said aloud, “Draco Malfoy!”

Which, of course, attracted the attention of the young reporter who was hanging out by the coffee shop on the corner of Diagon and some tiny close. And, seeing him with his Quick-Quotes Quill hovering over a piece of parchment looking like a starving wolf salivating over a steak, other reporters followed him.

A crowd gathered around him, despite his quick and agile footsteps. He stepped down the street a hunted man, the baby wailing as he hadn’t even through the explosions in Weasley’s shop, upset by the camera flashes and the sweaty palm pressing the back of his head too tightly.

The flowerpots in shop windows around them exploded. Draco heard some of the reporters scream in shock.

The sidewalk cracked, at first in subtle little spiderwebs, then in drastic mounts reaching from the earth, shot upwards by frenzied, reaching roots, grasping at anything near them, writhing with Draco’s surging magic. He heard people yelling and didn’t slow down. The sounds of panic were old as lullabies to him.

He exited Diagon Alley and walked as fast as he could, away from everything.

The baby never stopped wailing.

 

_*_

 

Draco found himself wandering through a little park in the middle of London, unsure of how he got there. Over the bridge in the middle of a small pond, he could see the Eye. He wondered what it would be like for those muggles, to be on the top of such a contraption. He wondered if it felt like flying did.

By now, the baby had quieted, his little face red and his eyes puffy from exhaustion, his nose runny and his tiny fingers gripping one of Draco’s tighter than he would have thought possible. Draco suddenly felt impossibly heavy, grounded and tethered, as though he was dragging a ball and chain around on his ankle.

 _Where are my shadows?_ he wondered, his thoughts almost a wail and just as mournful. _Where did they go?_

_Where are my trees?_

_Where are my storms?_

_Where is my **magic?**_

Draco felt hopelessly lost, and not because he was wandering around muggle London with a baby at his chest.

He’d entered the forest for the love of a person. And then he’d left it for the love of a different person, for the love of maybe the same person, for the love of a person he didn’t yet know. But he’d forgotten that while he was there, he loved too. He had loved the forest, and it had loved him back.

And if he loved himself, wouldn’t he return?

 _If you loved anyone else, you would return_ , the insidious voice hissed in his mind. _They don’t really want you back. They were living fine lives without you._

Draco shook his head, as though that would displace his thoughts. His mother loved him. Harry said so, he said that she’d remembered him. But what did that matter if he was too scared to confront her again?

At some point, he’d sat down on a bench. He didn’t know when. A gaggle of muggle children had flocked to the side of the pond to ogle a swan and her cygnets as they floated past, elegant and aloof. One of the mothers stood by where Draco was sitting.

“I hope you don’t find me too forward, but your son is beautiful,” she remarked. She had kindly eyes and mousy brown hair, her neck covered in a chunky pink home-knit scarf. A miniscule woman—Draco was certain she would have only come up to his shoulders.

“I—” Draco fumbled. “He’s not my son.” Instead, he said the first thing that came to mind, something that both Narcissa and George had said in their own roundabout ways. “He’s my brother.”

“Ah,” she replied, smiling warmly. “It’s good of you to take care of him then for your mother. What’s his name?”

“Ah—” Draco began. He couldn’t very well say he didn’t have one, and he wasn’t sure what sorts of names muggles had. “Scorpius,” he blurted, thinking of what his mum had once said she wished his middle name was.

“What an odd name,” she said, cocking her head. “Does it mean anything?”

“It’s a family name,” Draco replied. “Tradition, you know.”

“Mm.” she nodded thoughtfully, staring at the flock of tiny, raucous monsters she was guarding as they began shoving one another, apparently trying to cajole one or another into the pond. “I suppose you could shorten it to something, I think that would be rather cute.” She shot him another warm smile and motioned to the increasingly loud group of children. “Must be off, but this was a lovely chat. Have a good evening,” she wished him, and then went off to scold the lot of them.

Draco sat for a long while, thinking about what she’d said.

_Your son._

Well, Draco supposed, in some ways perhaps he was his son. Draco had irreversibly replaced him, and Draco, after everything, had been the one to bring him from the forts and into the world. Lucius was not there anymore, belonging only to the iron bars of Azkaban, and Draco knew that, even without his allergy, he would never visit him. Whether it was anger, shame or guilt that kept him away, he couldn’t be sure. And though he knew he may regret it later, his regrets would be far less than those of his father’s.

 _It’s good of you to take care of him_.

Draco peered into that little face, which was once again blinking at him in wonderment. Every so often, he would reach up and giggle. The world must have been such a pleasing array of fascinating qualities for the little boy. _When he’s not screaming_ , Draco thought wryly.

He wondered if it really was good of him.

He wondered if he could ever be good again.

He wondered if he ever had been to begin with.

 

_The only thing I ever hated him for was dying._

 

Draco wondered.

And as his thoughts sank, the sun sank with them.


	18. Chapter 18

 

At sunset, Draco decided it was a good time to return back in time.

He no longer had his shadows around him, but surely—ah.

Realization struck him more softly than it should have. There was no going back in time anymore.

He wasn’t as surprised as he should have been. Perhaps he had known it, niggling in the back of his mind. Perhaps he had been purposefully ignoring it, because even though he knew his absence would cause worry to Harry, perhaps he didn’t much care in the face of more pressing matters. Like trying to figure out what to do next. Like trying to figure out who he was. Like trying to figure out how to well and truly be a person, something before now he’d never really attempted, even before the forest.

He knew it was selfish. He had never pretended to be anything but, after all. But he knew, on some level, that if he’d had to wake up that afternoon and see Harry’s sleepy smile, feel his solid arms around him and hear his deep breathing and smell his enticing scent with the sound of shifting sheets around him, he would have left. He would have run right back into the forest.

Asking _why_ just made Draco bark a bitter laugh. He’d never had a future before. He’d never been happy before. And weren’t people afraid of things they didn’t know or understand?

Maybe he was more human than he thought.

He knew he would go back to Harry. He was heading there now, walking in a roundabout sort of way, heading in the direction that he knew was correct because the wind told him so, and was relieved that not all of his nature magic had left him when he left the woods. He would go back. But he needed to know, for himself maybe, that he was going back because he wanted to, not because he had an obligation to, not because someone told him to. Not because he needed to. Not because he needed someone to save him.

Draco could save himself, or he would, anyway, even if he couldn’t right now. It was a building project, one that would take time. There would be setbacks. There would be problems. There would be days he would ache for his shadows and mists and the depths of the woods. Days when he would miss the raucous din of fae revelry so profoundly it hurt. And he knew by the dull soreness in his limbs, in his back, in his whole body, that he was already missing his magic. How difficult it was, to go from a hurricane to drizzle.

Harry was worth going back to because of who he was, not what he did, despite the wriggling seed of worry and doubt in his stomach. But would he still want him, stripped of his power and mystery? Now that he was just a strange lost boy, too odd to be a wizard, too torn to be a fae?

Draco hadn’t shown him his flaws—he hadn’t given him time to show him anything. And that was maybe his most glaring fault of all.

He wandered through the streets, and he wondered what Harry would say.

 

_*_

 

Harrry was on his fifth cup of tea. Somewhere after the second or third, Hermione started making the decaffeinated kind.

Ron still looked rather flabbergasted. His blue eyes were a bit glazed, and he held his mug so tightly the tips of his fingers had gone white.

Hermione, on the other hand, wouldn’t stop grilling Harry with questions. _When did you start seeing him, what’s he like now, is his magic different? Does he look different? How did dreams differ from meeting him here? How did he fabricate the dreams? Was it Legilimency? Was it prophecy? Was it something else? How does time work in the forts? Has he aged at all?_ It was a never-ending stream, so rapid that Harry hadn’t even finished answering one when another interrupted him. She had that gleam in her eyes that she got when trying to make a potion levels higher than their own grade, trying to read texts that no one else could figure out. He’d seen it in second year, when she’d made her first batch of Polyjuice, and then again while they were hunting Horcruxes. She latched onto Draco with the sort of stubbornness and determination left for her work projects, and Harry had a feeling that any past tensions would be neatly swept away so Hermione could pore over him like a recently discovered endangered species. Which is also why he decided that he wouldn’t be taking Draco over for any visits until she was more accustomed to his presence. He loved her, and he wanted Draco to like her, but the side of her she was currently displaying was a bit too…intense, for the first meeting in nearly a decade. The first meeting Draco had with anyone, really, where he wasn’t trying to lure them to their doom.

If, that is, he returned. If he ever wanted to meet her. If he stayed with Harry long enough to even consider that.

Those were all things he’d taken for granted happening after the forest. He hadn’t thought, ever, that Draco would leave. It wasn’t conceivable. Harry didn’t like making people feel lke they owed him—he had wanted Voldemort dead more than anyone, and he’d never meant to kill anyone, not really. The war ended but it wasn’t just he who ended it. But he could save Draco, because Draco was special. And now Harry had saved him. But he still didn’t owe him anything, Harry kept having to remind himself every time bitterness crept up his esophagus like bile. _Draco has his own life, his own decisions. He doesn’t owe me anything. I wouldn’t want him to stay, if he was only doing so because he felt he owed it to me._

Harry knew that, and knew it deeply, but it still didn’t stop him from falling into an unparalleled mope—at least, unparalleled as of fifth year.

So when he felt the wards trip on his house, he cut off Hermione mid-question, and ran to the fireplace.

“He’s back.”

 

_*_

 

“Jesus, Draco, where the hell have you been?” Harry’s hair had ash in it from the floo and his glasses were halfway covered in soot, but he didn’t really care.

“I had to talk to someone,” Draco began, placing the baby back down in his transfigured crib.

“Who?”

Draco bit his lip, scrutinizing Harry. “Someone.”

Harry sighed, frustrated. Not a day with Draco, and he already wanted to pull his hair out. _Well,_ he thought acridly, _at least he’s predictable._ “And you couldn’t have left a note?”

Draco shrugged a single shoulder. “I didn’t…want to,” he finished lamely.

“Why the fuck _not_?”

“There’s no time in the forest,” he said, opening his hands in a frustrated gesture. “It wouldn’t matter if I left a note or not because there was no time to go along with it!”

“But this _isn’t_ the forest!” Harry exclaimed. “You worked really fucking hard to make sure of that!”

“I know, _I know_ , don’t yell at me,” he said irascibly, putting his hands up. His family never yelled, they just seethed—and the Queen did other things when she was mad. So much angry noise wasn’t something he was used to, and it always came from Harry.

Harry spluttered, shaking his head, before doing a flabbergasted approximation of a scoff. “All I wanted was a little warning!”

Draco gritted his teeth. “I know, I just—I—I’m not _used_ to this!” he said. “I’m not used to having to check in, I’m not used to having a timeline, I’m not used to not being alone, but I have you and I have this goddamn baby and I don’t even know how to be a _person_ anymore and how can I—how can I—fix it, him, me, I don’t know, Harry,” he ended miserably, whatever thin mask he’d been wearing totally broken to bits, his brow furrowed and his chest tight and feeling dangerously on the verge of something catastrophic. “I thought I knew what I wanted but I—I just don’t know anymore.”

Harry looked rather stunned at that deluge of information, but Draco wasn’t finished yet.

“He’s not mine,” Draco said, shaking his head and gesturing wildly to the crib. “I never asked for this. It’s not my baby!” he yelled, and couldn’t help but think of Narcissa, screaming _Not my baby!_ as she sprinted desperately. What she wouldn’t give to be in his place, if only he could talk to her. As if on cue, frightened by the raised voices, said baby began to cry once more. Draco wondered distractedly when he ever stopped.

“I can’t give her what she wants,” Draco admitted miserably about his mother, shaking with the effort of wrenching the words from that festering place deep within him. “I don’t know if I can give her who I used to be—I just want to leave! I thought I wanted to get out of the forest, and I did, but I—I don’t know.” He swallowed heavily. “I don’t know what I want.” Hs voice cracked at the last word. “I never got to think about what I wanted, and now I don’t know anything.”

“Ah,” Harry said. He was still mad about the disappearance—he could feel the wisps of it lingering—but it was overpowered, at least temporarily, by something like sympathy. “Draco…”

If anyone knew about not getting to choose, it was Harry. He knew it, and so did Draco.

Which is why Draco shook his head. “I don’t want to talk about it.” He eyed Harry, hesitating, so ready to fucking _talk_ , when all Draco could do was riddle, even when he wasn’t riddling. He couldn’t help but talk in circles because he’d never been taught how not to. His family walked on eggshells, and now that was the only thing he knew how to do. Difficult emotions didn’t have words.

Harry opened his mouth. “I—”

“ _Don’t_ tell me it’s going to be alright,” Draco snapped. “It’s not alright right now, and that’s where I’m living currently.”

“I wasn’t going to.”

“Oh.”

“I was going to say that you should probably go see your mother. I think she could help you out with a lot of this,” Harry said cautiously.

Draco rolled his eyes and checked on the baby so he could walk away from Harry, if only for a bit. The little boy had cried himself to sleep, exhausted by his eventful day.

Draco knew he had a point; he knew he had to see her; he knew he _wanted_ to see her, but that didn’t stop him from being absolutely terrified. And even after all that thinking, he didn’t feel quite prepared enough to see her again in her pristine glass castle by the woods.

Instead he walked up to Harry and looked into his troubled face, placing a hand on his cheek. “I’m sorry I left,” he said softly. Harry hummed, a noncommittal noise—Draco knew he wasn’t quite over it just yet. But they had time, now that it was here. It would take that for Harry to become less jumpy, and for Draco to become less flighty.

“Help me leave before I go,” he said, his fingers tangling in Harry’s hair.

“Go where?” Harry asked, his voice rather gravelly.

Draco blinked at him slowly and pulled him in for a languid kiss, his nails scratching at Harry’s scalp. He’d thought the answer was fairly obvious. But then, this was Potter.

“Where you just suggested,” he said. “I’m not ready yet.”

“How do you want me to help?”

“Fuck me,” he replied bluntly, raising an eyebrow with his predictable little smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth. “Haven't we waited long enough?”

After a moment of stunned hesitance at Draco's words, so much more straightforward and crude than the pretty words that usually poured from his lips, Harry kissed him back instead of responding. He was happy to oblige, after a day of jittery nerves, worry, and not enough sleep. Though he did so not quite how Draco had pictured, but then, Harry was predictable always in his unpredictability.

What Draco had envisioned was something faster and harder than what he got, his face pressed to a pillow and barely able to breathe, let alone think about any of his difficult thoughts. He’d craved something mindless and exhilarating, something rough enough to draw him out of his mind and into his body.

Harry grabbed his wrists in one hand, pinning them to the bed above Draco’s head as though afraid, if he was set free, that he would vanish again. Harry laid him down and kissed his body like he was worshipping an idol, made him feel things until he felt like he would burst, took him so close to pleasure that his mind went white and he forgot his own name but remembered Harry’s, always Harry’s.

No matter what, through years and centuries, forests and moors, peace and war and everything in between—it was always Harry.

 

_*_

 

The flames crackled green. The baby was held tight in Draco’s arms.

“Ready?” Harry asked, a fistful of powder poised in front of the three of them.

Draco’s mouth was a line, a heavy exhale audible from his nose. His nerves felt wired, his stomach inside out, and his eyes pricked with tears in anticipation.

“No,” he replied breathlessly, honestly. The only reason he wasn't running now was Harry's solid presence, the man he had fought so much for. For him, at least, he could fight this one last battle.

“Take me home anyway.”

“Malfoy Manor!”

The flames roared, and then they were gone.

Narcissa was waiting with open arms and outstretched hands, reaching for the sons she thought she'd lost. 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey friends!
> 
> One chapter left - the epilogue. That'll wrap up all the loose ends hanging about. 
> 
> Much love!
> 
> <3


	19. Epilogue

 

 

Scorpius realized at a young age that the term "parent" was one better defined loosely.

Yes, yes. He knew Draco wasn’t _actually_ his father. He never addressed him as such, because the rare few times Scorpius had when he was little or when he was distracted, Draco had gotten all mopey and solemn and had taken him aside, _again,_ to explain the origins of his birth.

He knew Draco cared about all that. It was important to Draco that Scorpius understood that they weren't actually father and son—Draco was terribly concerned that the little boy would somehow forget they were brothers and then be horribly scarred for the rest of his life when he remembered again. But really, it didn’t matter to little Scorpius. He thought it was kind of cool, what had happened—Harry had to explain most of it, because Draco’s words began running together in a flood of incomprehensible gibberish (which he staunchly defended as riddles) whenever he attempted to explain it himself.

Draco was the closest thing to a parent Scorpius had ever had, including his real parents, so he figured the universe would forgive him if he slipped up and called him _Dad_ every once in a while. And even if Draco got upset about it, Harry didn’t. He, out of all of them, knew that it was feeling and compassion that mattered more than birth or blood. He’d often become the one to comfort everyone at the end of the night, creeping into Scorpius’ room to ruffle his hair and talk about how much they both loved him before going back to where Draco sulked silently in front of the fire, petting overlong vines and shoots which sprung from their pots and curled around his hands, forearms and fingers in comforting, leafy attempts at a caress. When they did this, Harry was quite reminded of Ziti, though the snake himself had never been so overtly affectionate.

Scorpius never met Lucius, squirreled away and picking all his lost marbles off the floor in Azkaban. Narcissa’s mansion in Wiltshire was _enormous_ and made of all sorts of beautiful stones and structures, with paintings on the wall and ornaments on the tables he couldn’t touch. Everything felt preserved there, including the people. And even though he floo’d to Narcissa’s on the days when neither one of his dads could pick him up from the muggle school he attended in town, she intimidated him. He preferred to kill time at the Squib woman’s house he used for her fireplace near the school, a friend of Harry’s who liked cats too much.

Draco told him when he was little that he could live with his mum, if he wanted. In fact, as a baby he had until he was about a year and a half old, before Draco had admitted he wanted to take care of him—in part because his mother, beautiful as she was, was getting older, and in part because it had felt odd to him to be so far away from the baby after going through so much to get him back. And, most importantly, by that time he finally felt like he could.

Scorpius immediately and vehemently refused Narcissa's offer, saying he would lock himself in his room if they tried to make him go. Why would he want to live somewhere he would be treated like a pressed butterfly beneath glass, unable to do anything, disrupt anything, or even really live?

Besides, Narcissa was strict. Draco and Harry were not. Scorpius got coddled all the time—and he knew it better than anyone.  

Draco loved to take him out and buy him a special snack here, an ice cream there—Draco had an insatiable sweet tooth, and not keeping any in the house in an attempt to be healthy just moved him to get out of it and follow his hunter-gatherer instincts to the nearest bakery. He read to Scorpius often, books he’d read as a child and the muggle books Harry thought fondly of, and taught him about the plants in his greenhouse.

If one stretched the definition of the term, Harry would be considered the disciplinarian in the family, but not by much. He felt bad about going away on long Auror trips and worrying his family, so when he came back he often had a surprise or two from some foreign land to present them. He took Scorpius to sports games and enrolled him in childhood teams, cheering him on whether he scored a goal or tripped on his shoelaces. Both he and Draco were rather crestfallen when he proved to have an aptitude as a Keeper instead of a seeker, but Ron was chuffed beyond belief. Neither Rose nor Hugo had much athletic aptitude—something that Hermione was quite honestly relieved about—and so when they were all together Ron would often take Scorpius aside and give him pointers he'd learned back in his golden days of Hogwarts Quidditch.

He may have been a little spoiled, but Draco kept a sharp eye on making sure he wasn’t _entitled._ That was a mistake his parents had made, one he’d paid for dearly—it was important to him that Scorpius knew that the world did not owe him anything. That even though he and Harry loved him dearly (and each had what would have been a gross underestimation to call a small fortune saved for him), often the world would not be so kind. He wanted to teach him that it was kindness, not wealth or fame or bullying, which earned him the best sort of things.

He did his best. Scorpius certainly had no complaints, unless Draco was sniping at him to comb his hair or change his clothes, to which Scorpius would often respond in a whiny tone, “I’m not a _baby_.” This, of course, ultimately resulted in Draco getting his way and the boy would leave the house in something totally different than what he’d put on. And of course, he got the added pleasure of a snippy Draco for ages afterwards.

Harry was never any good backup, either. “Better to let him do what he wants,” he usually shrugged behind a mug of coffee, uncaring beneath the wrath of a frustrated ten-year-old scowl that looked amusingly like one he’d been on the wrong end of decades before.

However, despite the general air of contentment in the house, Scorpius and Harry were both used to Draco doing strange things on occasion. Nothing harmful, but…concerning, nonetheless.

Some days, he would sit at the window of their cozy cottage and stare into the woods beyond their yard for hours. No matter how Harry or Scorpius tried to pull him away—conversation, tea, once a couch set on fire due to some accidental magic and a temper-tantrum—he would give them some vaguely pleasant response (“that’s nice, darling” “sure, sweetheart”) with a distracted inflection, seemingly unable to tear his eyes away from the view behind the glass.

When Scorpius was little, he would stay like that for days. He wouldn’t shower or eat unless Harry begged—he would just drag over a blanket and a pillow and keep watch over the edge of the forest for something that the little boy could never understand. To him, it just looked like trees and shadows, but to Draco, it was much more than that. Harry called those his bad days, especially the ones where his grey eyes were vacant as he stared, like clear water over smooth river stones.

His bad days still happened, but they were fewer, now.

Sometimes, before he dropped Scorpius off at school—where much to Draco’s dismay they made sure to call him his muggle friendly nickname, Cory—Draco would give him oddly specific advice about the day ahead. “Don’t trade Matthew your cookies for his brownie today, honey. I know you don’t like nuts,” or “Don’t sass the substitute teacher, she’s going to be late and she’s having a bad day” or once, upon driving up to the school, Draco had abruptly veered in the opposite direction and informed him that they would be spending a lovely day at the park instead, much to Scorpius’ immense delight. On the way there, Draco spent about fifteen minutes on the phone with the town police, informing them that he had heard something from a house a few miles away while he was walking his dog and asked them to investigate.

Once he hung up, Scorpius informed him that they didn’t have a dog. “We do now,” Draco said, cringing as the little boy shrieked in excitement from the back seat. He cursed Harry for convincing him that they could not apparate to a space teeming with small children and watchful adults, and then cursed him again for teaching him how to drive.

They returned home that night with a little brown mutt of a puppy squirming in the boy’s arms, ice cream stains on his T-shirt and his knees green from rolling in the grass. Harry attempted to look disapproving, but within fifteen minutes, he was feeding the dog chicken out of the pan and playing tug-of-war with a dishrag. On the nightly news, Draco noticed one of the anchors reporting that a man in their area had been arrested for illegally harboring a weapon and had potential terrorist ties. Draco switched off the television and turned back to his family, happily rolling on the carpet with the dog. Harry was just as infatuated as Scorpius.

Whenever Harry noticed these bizarre little episodes, the jarring little visions or the declining days of foggy sadness, he would subtly try to take off work when he could, and asked Luna to come over for tea more often. Just in case.

_*_

 

Draco and Luna became fast friends. Harry had brought her over once, when Scorpius was still a baby and Draco still fretted and worried about having to see people again. She had a unique sort of kindness—she had a unique sort of everything. He knew she would be a good first person to reintroduce to him, despite or maybe because of the fact that they never had any real interaction in school, and he knew they would get along well.

When she entered the kitchen for the first time that sunny summer day, Draco straightened from his hunched position trying to feed the baby. He brushed off bits of baby food as best he could from his shirt without realizing that a stray bit of it striped his fine hair, wiped his hands on a cloth, and reached out to her solemnly.

“It’s good to see you again,” Luna said warmly, the affection that he did not think he deserved in her voice more soothing than the sunlight which streamed from the open windows.

“I was unkind to you before,” he said very earnestly, looking conflicted about how to proceed.

She shrugged. “We were children,” she replied, waving his worry away. “We all lived as best we knew how, back then.”

Still holding her hand, so small and warm in his, he reached for her arm. “I’m sorry about what happened to you in the dungeons,” he said sincerely, regret in his eyes and on his face.

She blinked. “You were never there.”

“I was once,” Draco admitted. “In a different time.”

“But that’s a different you from the one who stands here before me,” Luna countered softly. She had no questions for him, unlike Harry, who watched in befuddled silence. “Apologize only for what you have done, not for what might have happened.”

Draco offered her a tentative smile. “Alright, then.”

She beamed back at him. “Alright, then.”

From then on, Harry stayed far away from their unlikely friendship. Listening to the two of them talk often gave him headaches, and trying to follow their conversations felt like trying to get out of a maze with a blindfold on.

He loved them both. But separately, he decided.

 

_*_

 

As the little boy aged, he once asked Harry if Draco had the Sight. Harry had told him no, it wasn’t quite that, and then explained that the other man’s particular sort of magic often gave him glimpses forward or back, that to Draco, time wasn’t quite linear, or even circular, but more of a scribble because of his time spent for so long suspended out of it. Sometimes, when the lines intersected, he could see things that hadn’t happened yet. Scorpius wasn’t sure how this was different from a Seer, but figured it had something to do with his heritage, which Draco had also painstakingly tried to explain but Scorpius probably hadn’t paid enough attention to. A little boy had better things to do than listen to his parents talk abut when they were younger.

When Scorpius was older and could take the bus by himself, he would sometimes come home to Draco sitting on the front porch, engaged in a one-sided conversation with a large ginger tabby named Brigid. Scorpius wanted to call her something different and take her into the house.

Draco had a funny, sad little smile on his face when he said “She’s happier outside, darling”, and told him that he could leave some milk and honey for her if he really wanted.

Scorpius protested, quite rationally pointing out that “Cats don’t eat honey, silly!”

“This one does,” Draco replied firmly, as if she’d told him.

Perhaps she had.

 

_*_

 

Draco often found himself lost in thought on the nights of the new moon. The celebrations deep in the forest called to that thing held tightly within him. He had felt such a profound sense of _belonging_ there, with none of the frailty, sickness, or awkwardness the human world wrought. But he had a family here, one he loved entirely and tirelessly. He found the best way to keep himself from barreling into the nearest woodland, on these nights, was to keep them always close.

It was his family that reminded him why he’d left, why he had traded the power of the forest for the flightlessness of a caged bird. On the nights Harry was there, he would hold him close in bed and stroke his hair for hours, breathing in the scent of him. He would curl on the couch with him, leaning comfortably on his chest, bracketed by his knees, and read until Harry’s steady breathing lulled him to sleep. They rarely talked. They didn’t need to. Breaking the heavy silence felt too much like disrespecting the weight of the night around them.

Sometimes, when he felt most restless and distracted, Harry would make love to him, drawn-out and deliberate, leaving him strung out and incoherent on the edge of bliss for hours, so encompassed in what they were doing he forgot the forest, forgot the fae, forgot his name and who he was and wasn’t. Those nights, Harry treated him especially gently, treasured him like gold and silver, worshipped him like religion. Those nights reminded Harry of what he had come so close to losing.

On the nights Harry was away, risking his life for people who would never love him as much as he deserved, Draco felt the call of the forest deep in his bones. _You could protect him_ , it whispered. _All you have to do is come back._

Draco had already cheated death once before. He couldn’t hope to do so again. So he held Scorpius close when he would let him, snuggled in the bed with him and read to him as a little boy, and then cooked with him and baked endless desserts to pass the time as he got older. When Scorpius was old enough to understand a bit more—though not all—of how affected Draco was, he would make him rounds of soothing tea and play old movie after old movie on the television until they fell asleep on the couch together. He knew his older brother would always be a bit of a mystery, but like the still of the deep forest or the currents of dark waters, it seemed only natural to him.

Harry would always regale them with his heroic deeds when he returned, to the rapt and wide-eyed audience Scorpius gave him and the scoffing, teasing one Draco presented. He kept to himself the times he was on raids and saw a red-headed woman in the trees beside him watching closely, flowers braided into her hair. He kept to himself the times the killing curses just barely missed him, the times that explosions seemed to hold off, contained, until he’d gotten a safe distance away, the times he found himself, suddenly and without his consent, inches or metres or miles away from where he had been. He kept to himself the way he saw the shadows move during his fights and chases, driven by things that didn’t belong there.

Every time he got home safely, he would leave out a pot of honey and a Narcissus flower. Every time he saw Brigid, she seemed to have added it to the braids in her wild, tangled mane. Sometimes she glowered menacingly, and sometimes smiled at him, often dependant on how worried he’d made Draco while he’d been away. But whenever he waved, she would be gone, away with the wind, only a few fallen leaves blowing in the breeze in her wake.

Every day before he left for work, Draco would present him with a perfect four-leaf-clover and a funny little smile. It was the one that lived in a small, misshapen pot by their windowsill, crafted by tiny hands at a pottery class only once attempted. The stubborn plant existed only to be plucked, reaching for the sun again and again every day as it was reborn.

“Are all four-leaf-clovers lucky?” Harry asked him.

“This one certainly isn’t,” Draco replied, humor in his eyes.

He always kissed him goodbye.

 

_*_

 

Scorpius got used to the way Draco hummed aimless, haunting tunes and played melodies on their many instruments that didn’t make sense, that meandered like rivers and rose like mountains and fell like valleys, songs which gave him a sense of profound comfort and distinct restless longing for something he’d never known. Draco had become a clever, artistic creature the longer he resided within walls instead of woods—perhaps because of it. His music, his artwork, his gardens, they all had a profound and ancient untamable quality to them. It was something Harry admired, and each time he listened to a song, or glimpsed one of the paintings Draco squirreled away, or walked through the greenhouse, he became even more enchanted. He knew the things Draco made were ones he could never dream of, and not because of the differences in their magic. Harry had always been pushed and prodded by other people’s expectations, his one act of rebellion also his act of salvation. He was struck, many times over, by the thought that Draco saved him more and more with each passing day.

Draco could no longer hold the weather in his hand. He could once blink and there would be lightening, step and the earth would quake. He had no power like that any longer. His abilities had dwindled from those of a hurricane to that of an herbalist, but that mattered little to Harry, as long as he could have Draco for however long Draco chose him. Scorpius, who had never known otherwise, found his brother fascinating.

After all, he was the only wizard he knew to keep his wand in a little black box in the bottom of his bedroom drawer, rather than placed in a holster or shoved in a pocket. He had only ever seen the box once, and said that the wand was only to be used “for emergencies”. For personal reasons, Harry had a low opinion of the no magic outside of Hogwarts law.

Draco worked with Neville in greenhouses to sell their plants, herbs, and spices to apothecaries, midwives, and St. Mungo’s. He had a way with greenery. One only had to look inside their cottage to see it, covered in potted plants on windowsills and bookshelves, on counters and in corners. Even when Scorpius knocked over one, two more seemed to appear in its place.

Soon, Scorpius would leave on the train to Hogwarts. He wandered the woodland paths with his canine companion, memorizing them before he had to go. He was worried, but not awfully so. The little boy had a tranquil air about him, one that neither Draco nor Harry had ever possessed at his age.

Luna called him an old soul. Draco worried his strangeness had worn off on him, that he would never have any hope of being normal. Harry scoffed at his fretting—“Who would want to live a normal life?”—but secretly wondered if they should have braved the paparazzi and taken him out to socialize more before he had reached this age.

Even though the little boy wasn’t often taken out to the wizarding public, he did spend quite a lot of his time playing with Rose and Hugo. He knew them both well—every other weekend, they and their parents seemed to be at one or the other’s homes. From their time playing Quidditch together, Ron thought he was a nice child, if a bit quiet—he figured more time with Rose could help him snap out of that.

But when Hermione looked into his eyes, she saw more than an old soul, more than a strange boy, more than a shy child. She saw an unnerving amount of wisdom in his little round face, that pointed nose and those grey eyes so strikingly like Draco’s two and a half decades prior. This child knew things, even if he didn’t know it. _Sagesse_ , Draco called it once, when she’d rather foolishly brought it up to him.  

Draco had worried for weeks.

Unlike Draco, who was prone to fits of melodrama, Hermione didn’t think it was something to be bothered about. She wished Rose, bright as she was, would have a little wisdom. She took too much like her father, all well-meaning recklessness and no thought behind it. At least her loyalty wasn’t wasted—small as they were, the two were good friends, despite the two years between them.

And, as far as Hermione could tell, a child raised by two of the most successful Hogwarts troublemakers since the twins would probably need a good friend or two for the years to come.

Still, though. Sometimes the way he gazed at her left her uneasily feeling as though she had missed something important. It was, for sure, an odd air about him for a child to have.   

But Scorpius knew none of this as he meandered through the forest, his dog at his side. He didn’t think of the odd looks his parents and their friends sometimes gave him. He thought of the empty bowls of honey on their front step, of the smell of electricity in the air, of the soft fur of a ginger tabby reclining in the sun, waiting for Draco to come out of the greenhouse.

He peered into the shadows of the woods, unperturbed that his furry companion had wandered away in search of a stick or perhaps something new to sniff. He knew what he was looking for, and was gratified when he saw hazel eyes blink back at him.

Calling his dog back to his side, he smiled into the darkness. He didn’t see a flash of teeth, but he might have seen a wave.

Then, he left the forest.

The cottage windows glowed inviting and yellow. He could see Harry bustling around the kitchen, finishing dinner. As he walked over, he watched Draco set the table for three, his fingers still stained with paint splatters, streaks of dirt and color on his forehead and in his hair. He was laughing at something Harry said.

Scorpius smiled.

His parents were waiting for him.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to everyone for reading! And thank you double for all the kudos and kind reviews! :D <3
> 
> (If you liked this work, I'm gonna do some shameless self-promotion and suggest you hop on over to my story The Fight - quite a different plot, but one I'm particularly fond of :) )


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